A Business Process Flow in CRM is a tool which is meant to help guide users through a business process in the system. Business process flows are representations of your business processes and are displayed visually in CRM in the form of a heading across the top of an entity form.
A business process flow is composed of Stages, and within each stage there are Steps to complete which are fields. In the business process flow heading, a user can see which stage they are at in the process, and which steps they need to complete before they proceed in the process.
Business process flows enable you to require users to complete certain steps before completing the process and on the opposition, you can also allow users to jump stages if needed. They are available for out-of-the-box entities and even your own custom entities. Additionally, an entity can have many business process flows associated with it. They are highly configurable to fit your organizational needs.
One important thing to remember is that BPFs are not automated processes in CRM. They are meant to be a guide for a user to aid them in completing a process.
Tip! This chapter provides an overview of how business process flows work. You can learn how to create business process flows in the Business Administration section of The CRM Book.
Out-of-the-Box Business Process Flow
Dynamics CRM 2013 comes with a few out-of-the-box business process flows:
Lead to Opportunity Sales Process
Opportunity Sales Process
Phone to Case Process
To see a list of your available business process flows, navigate to the Settings area, and click onProcesses.
Under Processes, select Business Process Flows.
To introduce you to how business pare used, let’s look at the Lead to Opportunity Sales Processbusiness process flow.
Since this process flow’s primary entity is Lead, it begins on the lead entity. When you create a new lead, the process flow bar is displayed at the top of the form.
In some instances, users may feel comfortable working through a business process without using the process flow to guide them. Users can choose to collapse the process flow bar by clicking:
Then, the user can continue to work on the entity form without having the entire process flow bar displayed:
Business process flows are composed of Stages. Here, you can see that the first stage is Qualifyand is followed by Develop, Propose, and Close. You can tell which stage is active because it is a goldenrod color, while the rest of the stages are in grey.
Within each stage, there are several steps that users should fill in before moving onto the next stage in the process flow. Some steps my include populating required fields before proceeding to the next step. Required fields in the process flow are independent of the form save.
After filling out the required information, you can click Next Stage to move on and get the next set of steps. However, stages may remain locked if you have not completed necessary fields or actions. For example, in this process you still have to manually Qualify or Disqualify the lead before moving on to the Develop stage.
Once you move on to the next stage, you can see that it is now on a different entity:
The user will continue to move through the stages, completing the steps, until they have completed the process.
Microsoft also has several additional ready-to-use processes that you can add to your CRM. Please refer here for more information: Microsoft Additional Ready-to-Use Processes.
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