What Should You Know Before Creating a Workflow?

What Should You Know Before Creating a Workflow?

Introduction

Developing a workflow in your business is not a small feat. It can often be incredibly challenging, as it requires that you can see the big picture while simultaneously paying attention to the hundreds of small details that go into it.

You ought to have a clear picture of your business process “Documents flow from originating as input phase   , tasks processes , decision making  to Approval phase as an output”  that you want to automate ,

With paying attention to the individuals in the flow in order not to length the process or loosing efficiency and having backup in case of the absence of an employee.

With paying another attention to the business workflow , which manager will review and which one will approve and the approval limit and the queue that documents will pass by for reviewing.

Analyzing each small step of creating the workflow will guarantee the required results from the created workflow which are:

•  Increasing trust, transparency, and control
•  Improving the work culture.
•  Redundant manual tasks eliminated.
•  Employees became more efficient and multitasks.
•  Improving Communications
•  Reducing Errors.
•  The availability of increasing process automation.
•  Increasing productivity and efficiency

A Practical Example will illustrate the process of workflow clearly so let us imagine (Expenses reports are reviewed and approved via a workflow) as below:

Originating Phase

Sam is responsible for submitting the expenses report.
        He routed the receipts to Expense Report Department.

Tasks Phase

Here you can set a queue of reviewing and monitoring tasks
 For Example, Julia member of the department accepts the
task and after reviewing a part she can proceed to the next
reviewing process according to the business process ,
so let’s imagine that it’s only one step review and after that
She can perform one of these actions:
( Complete , Reject Delegate request change , reassign or release )

Complete : Completing the task and documents submitted to next step.

Reject: Reject the documents and send it back to the originator

Delegate: If Julia in a vacation she can delegate the task.

Request change: Notcing error and sending documents back to originator with a request to change the error.

Reassign: reassign documents that are in that queue to another queue.

Release: Occasionally, a member of a work item queue might accept a task, but then decide that she can't complete the task, In this case, the person who accepted the task can release the document back to the work item queue.

Decision Maker Phase

It’s a crucial step and always done by supervision or managerial level, here after the submitting and reviewing the decision maker must answer a question of (Yes Or No) or (True Or False) or delegating the decision to his assistant to proceed the action.

Approving Phase

          Documents then proceeded to approvals and they can perform
          one of those actions (Approve, Reject ,Delegate, Request Change)
         

And there can be tears of approvals for example manager A’s approval limit is USD 10,000 and B’s limit is USD 15,000.

Note That:
If a Workflow approvers rejected the documents then the workflow process ends , but if the Originator change the documents and resubmit it again the workflow will start
from the approval phase in Dynamics365 Workflow Editor

See you in the next blogs to know how to configure and proceed a workflow.

Sharing your knowledge and sharing this blog with your teammate is higly appreciated.