The problems management literature have not dealt comprehensive with small business response to disasters. This research takes a qualitative approach to consider how small businesses respond to and get over a large catastrophe, by interviewing stakeholders in five different communities in the Gulf Coast of America. Events that are considered to be crises in character are characterized by high consequence usually, low probability, ambiguity, and decision-making time pressure. Hurricane Katrina and its own aftermath caused small business owners in the U.S. Gulf region to see each of these. Findings include insufficient planning by small business; vulnerability to cash flow interruption; insufficient usage of capital for recovery; problems caused by Federal government assistance;, and serious infrastructure problems impeding recovery.

This is another important advantage of real-time workflows, but I’ll save that subject for another article. Anyway, so we’ve got a real-time workflow. Exactly what does it do? This can look familiar if some experience is acquired by you with CRM 2011 workflows, since it’s essentially unchanged. The Update step fills in the areas in the Account Information section, pulling them from the Account record, which is a parent of the opportunity. Next, notice the standard 3-step to estimate the weighted revenue field.

Dynamic beliefs in the workflow designer work the same as they did in earlier versions, which means you don’t genuinely have a calculated field capacity. Real-time workflows are similar in functionality to plug-ins, with the obvious difference that you don’t need to be a .NET developer to take benefit of them. Having a real-time workflow, you see the results as soon as the record is saved. In this example, if you change any of the “independent” values (say, est. income or possibility), the “dependent” value (weighted income) is updated in real time…once the record is kept. In Dynamics CRM 2013 form changes are kept about every 30 secs automatically.

OR, they could be preserved at any right time by hitting the save button in the bottom right of the form. With Jscript or business rules, calculations are performed as soon as field values are changed. This alternative user encounters reflect an underlying difference: workflows and plug-ins are triggered by database events; form script and business rules are induced by client-side occasions. If you’re new to this, it might be worth working through a direct comparison of the two approaches: the example in my own Business Rules article does the identical “weighted revenue” calculation with the (client-side) business rules approach.

The real-time workflow approach presented, this is actually the server-side alternative. Continuing our tour of business process newness in Dynamics CRM 2013, we come toActions now, another one of these generic-sounding words that masks the need for the new efficiency. Actions are similar to workflows for the reason that you use the workflow developer to generate them: to allow them to be built by non-technical users to put into action business logic and processes.

They may take input and output arguments. They are not tied right to entities: when you can identify an entity as in a regular workflow, you can create a global action also. Finally, they can only be accessed via code: so you need a developer to create a plugin or a custom workflow to place them to use.

That last point is particularly important, as it presents a caveat to the guidance, “Business procedures are for business users”. From a custom application, or integration with another application that communicates with CRM via web services. From code within a custom or plugin workflow. From Jscript code, behind an application, a custom button or some other command. Because it can take quarrels and doesn’t have to be tied to a particular entity, an Action is established at an increased level of abstraction when compared to a traditional workflow process. For instance, database designers typically think in entity-specific verbs like Create, Read, Update, and Delete.

But with actions, a business user can think in terms of business verbs like “Route”, “Assign”, “Escalate”, or “Onboard New Client”. Let’s have a look at how you may use a custom action. The business user knows what kind of data is needed by the account managers to work these overdue accounts; that’s reflected in the insight arguments in the previous figure. Here you can see the familiar step editor – identical to what we have in CRM 2011, aside from a couple of things activities don’t have. The business user gets the knowledge required to build the collections process, but certainly doesn’t learn how to build an application that integrates Dynamics CRM with an ERP.

1. Profile B: Minor blips on credit file in the past, but good recent performance
2. Accounting and legal fees for the business
3. Assisting you in obtaining a favorable Intelliscore
4. Ideas really aren’t worth whatever you think they are
5. Recruiting and staffing
6. 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
7. Accounts 60 times or less of age are over 80% collectible

Which is the complete point: the developer can offer the domestic plumbing and as long as the right arguments get exceeded in, the business process can do what it requires , be improved as business changes and so forth. Business process moves, real-time activities, and workflows are all important additions to your no-code customization toolkit.

And as we’ve seen, even though business guidelines aren’t considered a process, per se, you will often use them as an alternative way to perform a similar thing. It’s great to have many of these new options, and I understand we’ll all be finding great applications for them in the approaching weeks and a few months!