Dynamics 365 – Business Process Flows

Business Process Flow in Dynamics 365 is a representation of a business process, displayed in entity forms, it’s sort of guidance for the users to help them out to save their time, BPF will breakdown each stage of a business process into steps to ask the user, have you done this?.

Business Process Flows provide a streamlined user experience that leads people through the processes their organization has defined for interactions that need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind, a BPF can go through multiple entities, and multiple BPFs are allowed for each business entity.

So before going to how to create and use BPFs, first we will list down the limitations of the Business Process Flows,

-         Maximum number of activated BPFs per entity is 10.

-         Each process contains up to 30 stages.

-         Each Stage is a process contains up to 30 steps.

-         Multi entities process can contain up to 5 entities.

How to create Business Process Flow

You can create a BPF either from Settings > Process, Create a new record, a pop up window will show up

Then, the BPF editor window will be opened,

1.      To add a component (Stage, Condition, Step, Workflow)

2.      Cut a component

3.      Copy a component

4.      Past a component

5.      Delete a component

6.      Take a snap shot of the process and download it to your PC

7.      Used to connect stages after conditions

8.      Components list

9.      Properties of a component

10.  Stage component

11.  Condition component

12.  Step component (added on a stages)

13.  Workflow component(added on stages)

14.  To activate the process

15.  Order activated BPFs, so if your security role can display more than one BPF, then the first order one will be displayed to you

16.  To Determine which security role users the BPF will be displayed for

You can add components by drag and drop functionality or by the add button.

By clicking any component you can find its properties in the right side of the window, as below,

On each stage, you can add multiple steps, a step is a mandatory field to be filled in a stage, so the users cannot go the next stage in a process unless they’ve done all of the required steps in the stage.

Note: You can set each step to required or to non-required.

A workflow can be added to the stage, you can set the workflow to be rendered either on the entry or on the exit of a stage.

Note: you can only choose on demand workflows, and the workflow must be related to the selected entity.

You can add conditions in the BPFs, based on some action display a stage, for instance, after Stage A if there is a field contains data then display a new stage before stage B.

 The purpose of the connector button is to connect two stages after a condition, for example, if there is a condition on a field if contains data, if yes, it will display a stage called “Verify” otherwise, it will continue directly to Stage “Qualify”, so if we leave this without connection, if the condition result is true, it will not continue after stage “Verify” to the “Qualify” stage, in order to solve this case, we should use the connector, so by clicking the stage “Verify”, the connector button will be activated and then you can connect the two stages together.

After that, you can check the stages details, by clicking the details button on each stage, it will display a list of its steps and workflows to make sure nothing is wrong.

Then, you can adjust the processes order, if there is more than one BPF for the entity, and you can enable the process for multiple security roles to allow users to use the process, and then activate the process.

Example of how it will be displayed in the form, as below

Thanks!