Dynamics 365 – Business Rules

I recently published a post explaining the new features to be found on business process flows in Dynamics 365, in this post will continue that theme by looking at business rules.

Business rules have been given a facelift! As you can see below the flow is now drawn in a chart like view, this is particularly useful when your business rule is complex.

A few things to note include …..

Validate button.

The new validate button lets you check that your business rule is valid before publishing. You can see below that I have part entered a recommendation and then selected validate. Notice how any issues are highlighted with red boxes.

Recommendations

Recommendations are a new concept, lets first look at how they appear to the end user. See below that I have set my customer to be a preferred customer and a blue exclamation mark has appeared next to the credit limit.

Clicking the exclamation mark will show the recommendation. In this example, if a customer is set as preferred customer they typically get a higher credit limit and enhanced payment terms.

If the recommendation is accepted, then all of the changes mentioned are applied.

My business rule looked like the one below. It is simple enough, if the customer isn’t a preferred customer I set the credit limit to 10,000. But if they are I offer the recommendation we just saw.

The properties of my recommendation look like this….

Tip:
Notice I left the recommendation name as “New Recommendation”. All of your actions, recommendations (etc.) will have a default display name. You don’t have to change it but doing so will make your business rules much simpler to understand.

Notice how I have given the recommendation a title and in the details I have entered the information the user will see on the screen.

Having set the properties on the recommendation I added three actions. (You might have one action on a simple recommendation but I really like the idea that accepting a recommendation will do multiple things in one click.)

As an example I have shown one of my actions below. In my demonstration, all the actions simply set field values but you could add other types of actions if required. (Notice this time that I have set the display name on the actions which really helps make my rule easy to understand!)

I do like this new recommendation option. I hope you can see that it could save the user time when entering data and at the same time help to ensure a consistent approach to customer service.

I’m looking forward to using them in my next CRM deployment. J