One of the most efficient ways to minimize the time and financial resources required for training employees to complete repetitive tasks and get desirable outcomes is to supply them with a business process flow. It can be understood as a representation of an algorithm of actions that will lead an employee to a predictable result.
While traditionally a business process flow is a basic diagram, Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports the creation of highly detailed flows guiding employees through all of the possible steps.
Table of Contents
Business Process Flow Designer
Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides companies with ready-to-use customizable business process flows which can be adjusted to the needs of the majority of enterprises. Despite all of the variety of these solutions, you might still prefer to design unique business process flows for your specific scenarios.
In such a case, you can use Business Process Flow Designer which is a special feature with a drag-and-drop design and a user-friendly interface enabling quick and simple creation of completely new business process flows for Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Business Process Flow Designer views a flow as a sequence of stages and steps. Stages are used for grouping several steps. Completing a full stage is required in order to proceed with the flow. Steps might demand data entrance and can be seen as data fields. It is possible to use data entrance as a condition for moving to the next part of the flow commonly referred to as “stage-gating”.
Creating a New Business Process Flow
Before you proceed to work with Business Process Flow Designer, it will be sensible to think about the flow you would like to build in detail.
The very first thing you should do is identify its inputs and outputs. You can also think of your inputs as of information and resources, whereas outputs can be of different forms including other business process flow inputs, information, services and permissions.
Once you know these components, you will be able to come up with the activities connecting them. These activities as well as your elements should be maintained in chronological order. With this in mind, you can proceed to Business Process Flow Designer and put your idea into a digitalized and functional form.
To create a new business process flow, all you need to do is choose a new process from the settings. You will need to give it a name and choose its category and entity. Your business process flow can be built out of stages and data steps mentioned earlier as well as other elements such as workflows, conditions and actions.
Some of these components, for instance stages, have their own properties, which can be configured according to the specificity of your particular business process flow. Each stage also has its name and category. Note that stages themselves have different components and the most crucial of them is a step.
Real-life business process flows can be pretty complex and require branching which is supported by Business Process Flow Designer. Branching conditions can also be found among components.
Your process can now be saved and activated.
Advanced Options for Business Flow Creation
While business process flows seem to be less complex than other common types of business processes, the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics 365 makes it possible to add a lot of extra features and customization.
For example, Business Process Flow Designer supports multiple flows accessible to a single entity to cover the scenario of the same processes being executed according to separate plans by different employees. At the same time, a single business process flow can be used with multiple entities.
The designing tool also assists creation of concurrent business process flows featured with an identical starting record.
Moreover, the users of Microsoft Dynamics 365 can also create business process flows capable of calling workflows.
Security Regulations and Performance
Since Microsoft Dynamics 365 is processing crucial data and core business procedures, it is sensible to utilize its functionality for establishing security regulations for business process flows.
One of the options worth consideration is the Privileges settings allowing assigning certain permissions for different user roles. Some of them are similar to common terms used in other software systems, for example, Read and Write. In addition to them, there is a possibility of creating a business process flow instance with Create or enabling cross-entity navigation with Append.
Even though Microsoft Dynamics 365 is aiming to provide its users with wide options for the system configuration, it has to take care of maintaining the system performance. This requires setting certain limitations for creation of new business process flows.
So far, 10 is the maximum number of activated business process flows used by a single entity, while five entities is a current limit for a multi-entity process. Process flows cannot have more than 30 stages.
More information is available at https://xplusglobal.com/
