Workflows in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Recently, Encore hosted an event: “What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017”. We presented the best new Features in Dynamics NAV 2017, including workflows. enjoy!

Video will start playing at the correct point in the presentation.

Transcript:

So next thing I’m gonna do is go a little retro, go back to NAV 2016. I think we have a few customers here that are using NAV 2016. So there’s a couple of features in there that I really, really liked but I don’t think or have seen being utilized that much. One of them is kinda quite front end, which is Workflows. The second is a little bit more back end, and really goes into this new concept of extensions and, in particular, apps, and the direction that Microsoft is heading with regards to customizing the NAV application.

But I’m gonna start with Workflows. So I have brand new, whole new menu around Workflows. It is pretty generic. I can use the Assisted Setup that I showed earlier to kinda help me setup some workflows, but this one here I’m gonna setup specifically for the demo that I wanna show. If you do go into the Workflows, I can see that I have two setup already. I have a Vendor Approval Workflow and I also have a General Journal Batch Approval Workflow. If I wanted to create a new one, I can either create it from scratch and fill in all of the steps that I want or the price actually comes with a number of them pre-defined and then I just need to put in the additional little changes that I want and how I want it to kinda flow through the system.

So for this demo what I’m gonna do is one that I know gets asked for quite a lot is having a batch approval. So someone fills in a batch and they want to send it to somebody to be approved. So I’m gonna choose that one here. I’m gonna say OK. It’s gonna create a new General Journal Batch Approval Workflow for me. So we can see here it has a condition on the left, what happens, and then on the right, what is their response to that particular action. So here I’ve got Approval of a general journal batches requested. Then we have the General journal batch is balanced.

So we only really want the approval to come across if the batch is balanced. If it’s not, then we really wanna return to the user that the batch is not balanced. So at this point, it’s not really a candidate to be sent over for approvals. If it is balanced, then we can send it to an approval chain. So that can be either direct a person or I can setup a whole workflow group and I can setup hierarchies, I can set it up so that I can delegate it to other people. If I’m on vacation, I can setup a delegation to somebody else. If the journal was cancelled or it is rejected, then I can send a notification back to the user that that has happened too.

So here what I want to do is I wanna setup who receives that particular approval flow. So when I go into the response for A general journal is balanced, and I open it up with the assist [SP] button here. I got a couple of different steps that happen next. The first is it adds a record restriction. What it mean is you can’t…until it’s been approved or the approval has been cancelled, and then it tells me that I want to send a response to someone.

So I want my approver to get a notification to say, “Hey, can you approve this particular batch?” And I have a number of different options. I can tell it’s Delegate After a certain amount of time. That’s if someone’s too busy to get to it then I can create a delegation chain that says, “If I haven’t heard back within a day then it goes somewhere else or two days or three days.” I get the Approver Type so I can use Salesperson/Purchaser. I can use Approver. I can use the Workflow User Group. In this case, I’ve gone for the Direct Approver versus an Approval Chain or the First Qualified Approver or specifying a Specific Approver, which is what I could do here. So there’s lots of different options about how you can setup who receives the notification to approve these things.

Speaking of the notifications for the approvals, there’s a couple of different ways that they can get delivered. So I have to go in and setup the Approval User Setup. Setup a number of different ENCORE accounts and also SPENCER, an account we keep using for demos here. And we can see that SPENCER’s direct approver is ENCORE2. That’s who I’m logged in as. If I go to ENCORE2, I can go to Notification Setup, and what this is doing is this telling me how I’m going to receive my notification. What’s my preference? Do I want to receive them in email or do I want to receive them using the internal notifications? So Note or Email. When do I want to receive it? Instantly or do I want to schedule it so that it comes at a particular time, “Hey, in the morning at 8:30. I know I’m gonna be in the office at 8:30, can you send me my notification at once?” And also we have to define what Display Target is gonna be. So it’s gonna be the Windows client or is it going to be the Web client?

So for this particular demo, I’ve made it instant and I’ve made it a notification within NAV. So we’re gonna go ahead and we’re gonna pretend to be SPENCER and we’re going to create a journal and I’m gonna approve it. So we go back into this session of NAV. I’ve logged in at the bottom and you see I’m logged in as SPENCER. I’m gonna go ahead and select General Journal. I’m gonna do a Cash to a Cash. Not that this is something you would ever do, but it’s good for demo purposes.

Now what I can do is I can go ahead say Post. So do I wanna post the journal line? And it’s gonna say I can’t do this because I have an approval workflow in place now. So I can’t bypass that. I actually you have to follow what’s been setup in the system.

So if I go to my ACTIONS, I can see I now have this option called Send Approval Request, so I can say, I wanna send this to the approver. We know through my workflow setup that it’s gonna to come to my ENCORE2 account directly. So I go back into NAV as ENCORE2, back to my Home, like I said, rather than setup email, I set that up using the Notification Setup. So I scroll down to My Notifications. I can see that I now have a note that says General journal batch cash requires your approval. So I double click that, it takes me directly to the journal. I can review it make sure all the information’s there, make sure the description is correct. Maybe the document number’s right. And then I can go ahead and approve that.

And if I go back to SPENCER, back to SPENCER’s Role Center, and down to his notifications. I can see the Approval Entry has been created. So now I’m good to go ahead and post that. So I’m gonna go back into my General Journals again, find this guy and I should be able to post this. There you go.

So that’s a quick run through of the Approvals Workflow and workflow in general. It is kinda quite dexterous. I can set that up in lots of different ways. This is a common one that I’ve had request for. So I thought it would be pretty kinda useful to show that one. Any questions on workflow? Okay.