I’m loving what I'm seeing with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 and one of the improvements that excites me most is Workflow. It's a capability that both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics AX have had for some time that Dynamics NAV’s lacked so it's brilliant to see that it's arrived now.
So for those of you that haven't come across workflow what does it do? Well the best way of describing it for me is using the phrase ‘if this then do that’.
Let me explain further. Lots of customisation requests that we have had in Dynamics NAV have been to add some code so that when particular data is entered or even is missing the system should do something specific. We had to add code to the field or record so that it checked if the specified condition occurred and do what we then wanted which could be from displaying an error to updating a different table to sending an email. This is precisely the type of tasks that I hope we can now do via defining a workflow without writing a line of code.
That’s going to mean that is far easier and potentially an end user or at least systems administrator task to add data validation or approval workflows that significantly improve the flexibility and functionality of the system without customising it.
I suspect it's going to take a little while for us all to learn the true capabilities of this new feature and develop the workflows to exploit it fully. In a perfect world, there are lots of customisations that we should be scrapping and replacing with workflows, but I think it's way too early to do that yet even if it could be financially justified.
What we do need to do though is think about where this capability can be best used for people upgrading to 2016. With my data quality obsession I'm keen to see workflows used to validate mast data records, ensuring they are valid before they are used. Rather than code to check if the blocked flag can be removed how about a workflow? Watch this space.
Note
This post is part of a 9-part series. A link to all the posts in this series are below (updated as published);
- Intro
- Part 1: First Public Sight
- Part 2: Dynamics NAV 2016: Functionality
- Part 3: Dynamics NAV 2016: CRM
- Part 4: Dynamics NAV 2016 : Office 365 with PowerBI
- Part 5: Dynamics NAV 2016: Workflow
- Part 6: Dynamics NAV 2016: e-Everything
- Part 7: Dynamics NAV 2016: Windows
- Part 8: Dynamics NAV 2016: Engineering
- Part 9: Dynamics NAV 2016: Azure