Business Process Flow in D365 – Explained

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

They strive to streamline the business processes to ensure that their employees perform with consistency and deliver without fail every time they work with their clients.

Business process flows are guidelines for users that lead them through their work and businesses make it their mission to create a business flow.

To ensure that customer service requests are handled efficiently by your teams, even your organization may need to create a business process flow.

Out of all the business flow processes, Dynamics 365 business process flow is a wonderful feature added to Dynamics 365 customer relationship management (CRM). It helps your team through the various stages involved in the business by defining each of them.

To begin with…

What is Dynamics 365 Business Process flow (BPF)?

Based on the operations of a business, a business process flow helps a user design a business flow quite simply for the organization.

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

That’s where Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow plays its part. This tool provides users with visual representations of their business flows and helps users understand the different stages involved with the business processes.

Other than that, it helps users in understanding essential information that is captured in a stage component. In 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 which means you can easily access the same BPF through the D365 mobile app.

How do you enable a Business Process Flow?

Any business needs to enable a business process flow to their authorized users alone.

‘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 enable the privilege of accessing 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 on the ‘Business Process Flows’ tab where you can see what security roles are assigned.
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.”

In case the user is not able to 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 to 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 that is 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. For adding a branching condition to the process, click the “Components” tab and drag the “Condition” component to the + sign between 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.

For each security role, you can set their specified privileges.

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, and it 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 allows a user to 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.s

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

A final wrap-up

D365 BPF does not open ways to any business or logic automation, instead, it provides a streamlined data entry experience that helps you control the entry in the form of stages which makes it easier to use than other process flows.

The drag-and-drop feature in the design area makes the D365 BPF simple for those with limited development skills. Apart from that, it consumes less time and increases efficiency, reduces training costs, and boosts user adoption rates.