Business process flows are essential when you have multiple steps involved in working on a record. A well-defined business process will lead end users through each step and ensure all pertinent information is gathered before moving forward. Let’s review the different parts of a business process flow.

Stages

It is important not to clutter your business process with too many stages. A good recommendation is to set a stage for each time a record needs to change hands. Another suggestion would be to set stages based on points within the process where you want to track time spent.

There is a maximum of 30 stages per business process and it can go across up to 5 record types.

Conditions

Setting conditions provides the ability to designate different paths within a business process flow. This is helpful if there are different branches or divisions that would follow a different set of steps. It is best that these criteria points are included in an option set to eliminate potential human error.

Data Step

Data steps are the individual fields that will appear within each stage of the process and they can be designated required or optional. These fields can already be placed somewhere on the record form, but they would be duplicates and changing either one would update the other one.

There is a maximum of 30 steps per stage within a business process.

Workflow

Workflows can be added to the stages within a business process and can be triggered either when a record enters or exits a stage. The workflows used must be on-demand workflows to apply to a business process flow.

In addition to workflows within a business process it can be helpful to add a separate real-time workflow that ensures a record has gone through all stages of a business process before allowing it to be closed.

When creating business process flows always keep the end user in mind to ensure the stages and step flow naturally as this will improve efficiency in record handling.

-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant