Following on from my earlier post about the workflow editor, naturally leads us to how workflows are managed in the system.
I’ll use this post to talk about how you can review workflows that are either in process or completed and what to do if one of your workflows fails trying to complete your day-to-day tasks.
View the progress of your workflow
Your first step will have been to submit an item to workflow, whether that’s a free text invoice, purchase order, etc.
You can then view the history of your workflow by going to the source document and selecting the Workflow tab again. Depending on your role and permissions within the system, you should see a View history button. Open this to see the steps of the workflow, approval assignments and errors.
The most likely error you will see is one where the workflow is unable to find a user to assign the approval to. This is generally a result of user group or security role changes, or in the case of a bad design, if a single user has been designated in the workflow.
Many workflows will assign manual approvals to all users within either (i) a certain user group, or (ii) assigned to a particular security role. If all users are removed, the workflow will not be able to find a person for approval and the workflow will fail.
Other errors you may see are approvals going to the wrong teams, which would be a result of incorrect workflow creation or changes.
If this happens, then from within the workflow history, assigned approvers (and system administrators) have the option to reassign a workflow item to a different user:
Workflows with errors can be resumed from the view history page once fixed or recalled and resubmitted:
Regardless, the root cause should be investigated and fixed. If you are submitting an error report to your system administrator, the workflow history would be a great place to start.
Using the Tracking details lists tab above, you can click “View workflow details” to see exactly where your workflow has gone wrong, and if you’re lucky, exactly what the error is. This will mean the administrator or support agent can find the right workflow, and the right point within the workflow to fix.
Versioning
D365 F&O does a good job with workflow version control. Any changes made to a workflow automatically create a new version number (dependent on the scale of changes made), which you can choose to activate or keep inactive. The version history is also stored so you can regress in case of error:
You can see above that there are two versions of the same workflow (000141) available, however only Version 1.0.0.0 is active and this is the workflow that will be used. If we were to activate Version 1.1.0.0, the prior workflow would automatically inactivate and the new version would be used for all subsequent workflow submissions.
Defaults
A last important point to make is that there can only be one default workflow, of any one workflow type, at any point in time. Setting a workflow as the default allows the system to know which one should be used for document:
