Business Process Flow in D365 – Explained

Businesses run on goals that benefit their cause and that of their customers.

They strive to streamline business processes to ensure that their employees consistently perform and deliver without fail every time they work with their clients. Juggling multiple tasks, remembering the next steps, and ensuring consistency across your team can feel taxing. To standardize processes and help you improve customer experiences, Dynamics 365 offers a powerful tool called Business Process Flows (BPF).

BPFs are guidelines for users that lead them through their work, and businesses make it their mission to create a business flow. While these tools can’t automatically complete tasks, they offer something even more valuable: a structured, user-friendly approach to navigating even the most intricate workflows. This blog explores how BPFs in Dynamics 365 can enable your team’s productivity to skyrocket.

What is Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow (BPF)?

Based on a business’s operations, a business process flow helps a user design a business flow easily for the organization. Dynamics 365 provides users with a user-friendly Business Process Flow designer.   This designer utilizes a drag-and-drop interface, allowing administrators or designated users to efficiently construct and customize BPFs for various processes within the CRM system.

What do you need to do for visual representations of these business flows?

This tool provides users with visual representations of their business flows and helps them understand the different stages involved in the business processes.

It also helps users understand essential information captured in a stage component. In the D365 Business Flow Process, the stage comprises multiple steps where data can be inserted. So basically, BPF gives you visibility into every phase of the process.

Business process flows are mobile-friendly, so you can easily access the same BPF through the D365 mobile app.

How do you enable a Business Process Flow?

Dynamics 365 allows you to assign BPF access based on security roles.  This means you can grant access to specific BPFs only to the teams who need them.  For example, the “Salesperson” role might have access to the “Lead to Opportunity” BPF, while the “Customer Service Representative” role might have access to a “Case Resolution” BPF.

‘What happens if all users have access?’ That might be your question.

It can easily cause a security breach, and to avoid that, you will be able to access the business process flow only for security groups that need access to it.

Given below is the step-wise flow of how you can give a security role access to a business process flow:

1. Go to Settings >> Security >> Security Roles
2. Choose a security role that you want to enable your business process in. (For example, if the person you want to enable your BPF is in a salesperson role, you can choose ‘Salesperson’)
3. Click the ‘Business Process Flows’ tab to see the assigned security roles.
4. Give the security role business unit or complete organization access
5. Finally, click on “Save” and close.

How do you switch to a new business process flow?

What helps users to switch to a new BPF is that they are customizable. The users for each “Security Role” have a new process option when the administrator enables the new business process flow.

Follow these steps to switch to a new process flow:

1. From the record of the “Entity” type related to your new business process flow, click Process >> Switch Process
2. Choose the business process flow you want to use and click “Select.”

If the user cannot view a business process flow, their security role will not have authorization to that BPF. If that is the case, then the administrator will have to enable and allow access to that BPF to that particular security role.

What is a BPF Designer in Dynamics 365?

The business process flow designer in Dynamics 365 is a feature that helps customizers, administrators, or super users create a business process flow.

This has an easy-to-use ‘drag and drops’ UI that saves much time and reduces complexity.

Without a doubt, creating multiple business processes can be tedious, but the D365 BPF designer assists users with defining and managing their business processes effortlessly.

The lead entity in the Dynamics CRM business process flow is set to a default business process flow to direct the lead to the opportunity sales process.

But you are free to create a new BPF in D365 and execute it:

1. Go to Settings >> Process >> New
2. Click “New” to create a new business process flow D365
3. Enter “Process Name”
4. Select “Category” from the drop-down menu
5. Select “Entity” from the drop-down menu
6. Click “OK.”

After you create the process, the BPF designer opens a single stage designed just for you.

When the BPF designer screen opens, it contains multiple options to set up a process flow.

1. Click “+Add” to add a Stage, Data Step, Condition, Action, and Workflow step to your business process.
2. For setting properties for a stage, click “Stage” and then set properties in the “Properties” tab:
3. Enter a “Display Name”
4. Select “Category”
5. Select “Entity Name”
6. For adding steps to a stage, click the “Components” tab and drag the “Step” component to the stage.
7. To add a branching condition to the process, click the “Components” tab and drag the “Condition” component to the + sign between the two stages.
8. Click “Save” in the action bar and activate the process.

 

What privileges do you get in D365 BPF?

Each business process flow is represented as a custom entity with editable privileges within security roles.

You can set the specified privileges for each security role.

Here are the privileges you may assign in the business process flow:

Create: It allows a user to create an instance of a business process flow, which is done simultaneously while creating a new record.

Write: It allows a user to update the business process flow- for example, the user can change status or navigation.

Read: It only lets users view the business process flow in a created record.

Append: It allows a user to do cross-entity navigation from any entity. For example, it can enable users to navigate Lead Entity across “Lead and Opportunity Sales Process” in the business process flow.

Delete: It allows users to delete an instance.

Append to: It will enable users to do cross-entity navigation to an entity.

Wrap-up

While Dynamics 365 Business Process Flows (BPFs) don’t offer built-in business logic automation, their true strength lies in simplicity. Unlike complex process flow tools, BPFs prioritize a streamlined data entry experience. By breaking down processes into clear stages, BPFs guide users through each step, ensuring consistency and reducing errors. This user-friendly approach, coupled with the intuitive drag-and-drop designer, makes BPFs accessible even to those with limited development expertise. By focusing on user experience and streamlined data entry, BPFs empower your team to work smarter, not harder. Ready to unlock the potential of BPFs in your organization? To learn more about BPFs and make the most out of Dynamics 365, talk to our experts.