Business Process Flows Summary

In this activity, we learnt about business process flows.

We learnt that part of the power of the business process flow is in its ability to ensure that data is entered consistently and that users follow the same steps every time. It is a way to ensure that your entire team is following the same process.

We learnt about stages and how users interact with them. There are three kinds of steps:

1. Data steps
2. Workflows
3. Action steps

Steps can be required so that the stage cannot be completed without that step. A maximum of 30 steps can be added to a single stage. These data steps can be linked to fields to aid in data entry. If the field is already populated on the record, the result will be visible in the business process flows step as well.

We learnt about the many options to consider when configuring a business process flow.

We learnt about branching, which may be used as a simple decision point of where an additional stage is added for some records or where the process splits into two distinct processes. In more complex scenarios, there may be multiple levels of branching, for example, where answering yes to a condition starts a stage and answering no presents another condition.

We discussed configuring a business process flow, which spans multiple entities. And another consideration we discussed was stage gating. Since a business process flow stage is comprised of steps and users advance to the next stage by clicking the next stage button, if any of these steps within a stage are designated as required, these steps will prevent the user from clicking the next stage button. This is a way to enforce that a defined business process is followed. You can also set the order of the business process flows, so you can control which business process flows will be set by default. This works in much the same way that multiple forms for a single entity are defined.

We followed up by looking at a few other considerations when customising business process flows. One thing to keep in mind is that only one business process flow is visible on a record at a time, but multiple processes can run concurrently. This can be done by switching between processes and by setting the process flow order.

Next, we want to keep in mind the impact we may have on existing automation, particularly workflows. When a user enters data into the steps on a business process flow, the data changes are also applied to the form fields so that any automation provided by business rules or form scripts can be immediately applied.