How useful is Workflows?

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I'm talking to a contractor and he said in his 10 years with AX, he only created it once -- suggesting it's not that useful.

What's your experience/opinion regarding Workflows?

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Shahrukh 501 on at

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I have worked on workflows a few times, let me share how these are useful and when we use it. I will share you my own scenario.

A few months ago we had to apply workflows on purchase orders that if the total amount of a purchase order is greater than $10,000 then send it to the manager for the approval, other wise auto approve that purchase order.

So these are useful when we have to apply some rules.

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Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

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You have a couple of scenarios where workflows are extremely valuable.

If you are in a large organization where you need to do all sorts of approvals, HR and Finance will set up rules (signing limits) per department or per person that how much money can that manager or employee handle. In case they need to approve a 100 different things a day manually in the Purchase Requisition screens, they would pull their hair out.

With an approval workflow and the combination of using signing limits, you can set up rules to automatically approve requests which fall within their approval limit (95% of the cases), and only need to do manual approval or rejection on the remaining 5 which could be of higher value, or belong to financial dimensions which is not covered automatically.

The workflow engine is very robust, can send e-mail notifications, you could do 1-click approvals from the e-mail directly.

I would say once you set it up correctly, it will do its' job. The beauty of it is that for the areas which support workflow, you could set up complex scenarios as a consultant, without a single bit of coding.

However you can expand the framework nicely with some development, like to support the above mentioned financial dimension-based signing limits, or to use custom hierarchy providers instead of the default organization/HR hierarchy charts.

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André Arnaud de Cal... 301,020 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi djim,

Vilmos described the workflows in a beautiful way. They are useful. The contractor is probably not that experienced with workflows or didn't had too much requirements for it. At any implementation I have done with Microsoft Dynamics AX since the year 2010, the workflows were requested.

Small companies probably don't required that much approvals. Regardless the size of a company, when they use expense management or timesheets, workflow is always configured.

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Iulian Cordobin 8,201 on at

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To also just add a +1 to the list in favor of the Workflows, let me say like this: the Workflows gain immense value with AX 2012 (until then they were a little bit hard to setup / use), so the 10 years do not count, only the last 5, and in those last 5, I believe that every major project I did used at least one workflow if not more.

André and Vilmos already mentioned the major areas where they are used.

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