Many businesses have put considerable effort in implementing Business processes that ensure core business functions continually run smoothly. These processes allow businesses to set expectations, ensure consistency and determine where there is a lag.  Business processes are even more useful in service-oriented business where regular customer engagement is necessary to enhance customer relations and to convert and retain customers.

So it is not uncommon to come across office manuals created to document these processes. These manuals are often thick and are a permanent adornment in most cubicles.  But that is so 2010.

Workflows in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
If you are a Microsoft Dynamics Crm (CRM), you will be pleased to know that CRM allows you ample flexibility when copying real-world business processes to be CRM-driven business processes.  The good thing about CRM is that it enables you to model these business processes with minimal effort.  Where enhanced features are required, CRM provides developers with mechanism that enable them to extend and customize the standard behavior of processes to achieve the functionality that their business applications require. Such enhancements might be in the form of custom components such as plugins. In other words, if your business has put in place a process that leverages data that is available in CRM, chances are that is entirely possible to replicate these processes using out-of-the-box CRM processes.

So what are these processes as it relates to Dynamics CRM? CRM defines business processes as either of two types: automated processes that rely solely on communication between applications based on a set of rules, and interactive processes that also rely on people to initiate and run the process.  Cognizant of the fact that business processes are a big part of any company, Dynamics CRM has provided useful mechanisms that enable any organization to enhance the usage of CRM data through the following features.
 
Workflows
Workflows allow CRM users to automate task that depend on CRM data. A few examples of these tasks might be:

1. Send a welcome email to a new customer/contact
2. Send a birthday email to a contact
3. Query a web-service to provide customer with updates on shipping details
4. Schedule a phone call when customer order has shipped
5. Schedule a survey when a customer’s case has been closed
6. Apply a standard discount for certain accounts

… and many more. The power of workflows is that any process can be configured to run in the background or in real time and can optionally require user input.  Usage of workflows would certainly vary from one organization but  some common results from using workflows is enhanced productivity and making  ‘CRM come alive’ according to one of my clients.

Actions
As Dynamics CRM has improved over the years, one notable benefit is that successive releases have provided enhanced features that have eliminated the need for custom development. One such improvement is ‘Actions’ which are custom advanced messages. For example, out-of-the-box CRM provides a set of pre-defined messages for each entity such as create, update, delete etc. These core messages are sufficient in most cases, however, there might be other situations where you might want to add custom actions for a specific process such as approve, reject, delegate etc.  A common implementation of actions in CRM is in the case of a support call center, you could combine create, assign, and set operations into a single new “escalate” operation.

Business Process Flows
Business Process Flows provide a visualization of business process flows. If a certain business process requires successive movements through various processes, then the businesses process flow is the CRM answer to this. These business process flows can be displayed visually in CRM as a heading section 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 correspond to fields on the CRM form.

 
Dialogs
Dialogs provide an interactive step-by-step data entry form that requires user input to start and run to completion.  These dialogs can be in the form of question and answer format that can be run on-demand or as a child to another process. As the user answers each question, the information can be stored in a record, used in a search or a number of other possibilities. Dialogs can be very useful in situations such as in a call center environments where certain responses are always required as part of the interactions customers.

All in all, Dynamics CRM is highly useful as it provides you with sufficient tools to replicate your real-world business process. If used efficiently, businesses process can enhance your CRM usage through effective automation and overall error-free engagement with CRM.

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