All You Need To Know About Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow Branching

Accuracy and efficiency are vital parts of everyday business operations. Over time, every business can identify the crucial steps involved in its processes and procedures. And this knowledge helps them formulate and build efficient business processes with all specificities sorted out. But just identifying what works is not enough. You also need robust infrastructure, tools, and support systems to help you keep implementing the successful business process recipes consistently.  

The Dynamics 365 Business process flow helps you achieve that and more. Besides helping you set up critical business process flows, it can also help you continuously improve the processes, keep track of all data and feed you valuable insights.

What is a Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow Branching?

We all know that while business processes may seem simple on paper, the actual steps involved could easily get complex depending on the many variables you will have to consider. Take, for instance, a simple customer service process where you need to register a complaint from a customer. The straightforward steps would be to get the customer's details and then register their complaint.  

But the process could slightly differ depending on certain conditions such as whether the customer is new or an existing customer, their preferred language, their geographical location, the type of complaint they have raised, etc. Such conditional process flows require a branching method.  

The Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow Branching allows you to implement such complex business process flows so that the desired outcome is met at all times. These branching business process flows use if /else conditional clauses and the information presently available to determine the next step that should be taken.  

When Is It Useful To Create Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow Branching?

Dynamics 365 business process flow branching is a powerful tool. But overusing it could lead to needless complications and increase the time it takes to achieve the final outcome. Not sure where to start ? Don't panic, give us a call!

Here are some pointers you can check to see if you need Business Process Flow branching  

When you are sure of the steps to be taken for each branch.

The steps taken for a branch should remain the same. As business process flows are used as guidelines to execute a process, ensuring all possible steps are taken care of is essential.  

If the business process involves vague steps or cannot always be achieved with the same set of steps, business process flows may not wholly serve your purpose.  

What Are The Benefits Of Using Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow Branching?

Branching business process flows are helpful in multiple ways. They help you optimize the business process flow and reduce any redundant steps. Depending on the conditions present, you can easily skip over or find better ways to execute a process.  

It can be easily customized to fit your particular needs. It allows for non-linear processes and thus allows you to accomplish more with less time and resources. It helps you make the business processes more user friendly. It helps boost productivity  

Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow Branching Rules

All business process flow branches are formulated based on if/else conditional branching rules. The better design you make for these rules, the more optimized your business process flows will be.

---> Head over to our article to learn how to create a conditional branch.<---

Here is some information to help you create better Business Process Flow Branching rules.  

Remember that a process can only span across five entities at the maximum. Every process has a stage limit of 30, and every stage has a step limit of 30. So the maximum number of stages your process can have is 30, with each stage allowed to have up to 30 steps.  

The branching logic should be made based on the information provided by the immediate preceding step. Multiple conditionals can be combined using the logical operators AND or OR. You can only use any of these two and not both simultaneously.  

Dynamics 365 Business Process flow allows you to specify a 1:N entity relationship for a process flow. This is optional and can be used for any one-to-many entity relationship.  

You can run more than one active process on the same data record. You can easily restructure your process flows by dragging and dropping the various stages, steps, and conditions. When you are trying to merge branches, you should connect all peer branches to a single stage, or else each peer branch should end the process

How To Create A Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow Branching?

Here are the steps to create a Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow branching:  

Go to Settings > Processes and click on New to create a new Business process

Select the process category to be a Business Process Flow and the primary entity. This entity should be relevant to your business process.  

You can add stages to the process and then add individual steps to each stage. Name your stages and steps appropriately so that the purpose can be easily understood.

When you introduce branching, you will have to add the condition tile after a common stage.  

Create new condition tiles and add the rules that check for the requirements that must be met.  

Create a new branch of the process with its own stages and steps and hook it to the Yes Branch of the conditions  

For the No path of the condition, add the branch with the sequence of stages and steps that must be executed if the conditions are not satisfied.  

You can also add additional condition tiles to the paths in case of complex branching logic.  

All the stages, steps, and condition tiles can be rearranged by dragging and dropping them across the editor. Remember to test your business process flow conditions before putting them into actual use.  

Our experts are here to help !

Setting up a Dynamics 365 Business Process Flow branching does not necessarily require extensive programming language. But you need a good deal of Dynamics 365 expertise, an in-depth understanding of how your business processes work, and a lot more technicalities to create efficient business process flows. Gestisoft can be your perfect partner to help you through everything related to the Dynamics 365 platform.  

We provide you with the right expertise, guidance, and custom solutions to get your business up and running without having to sacrifice quality or productivity time.