Power Automate Tutorial - Business Process Management Approvals

[Music] [Applause] [Music] what's up guys welcome back I am here with my friend Serge Luca what's going on Serge how you been I'm fine good good good so Serge is here today and he is going to teach us Business Process Management with the power platform you've seen some of this before Serge has alluded to these things in other videos and shown you bits and pieces along with state machine but today he's gonna show you a full layout of how he does BPM so Serge why don't you go ahead take it away first off introduce yourself and then go ahead and talk to us about what you are going to teach us today ok so John if you want to share my screen right go for it yes sir ok so what I want to talk about is why live call it the platform ppm toolkit but first I'm going to reduce myself so I'm dr. flow and some people still call me Serge they take Joe and it's it's nothing it's changing its changing its changing yes individual videos and MVP no physics is 5 and also MVP business application so my heart is in both products both platforms and I'm also do to automate in a day that you know John I didn't know that I did I don't know if they knew that but I knew that yeah and I'm basing presses so I have a company called perfect from associates with another MVP Isabelle with an MVP in the data platform so she's the data specialist and what we do in this in this company is we provide consulting on the power platform so we have a concept that we call a power pack from factory 2020 when we guides companies to make use of the proper form for citizen developer or for creating complex enterprise application ok so basically we provide guidance on IT governance strategy talent administration which teach courses so learning the platform we show how to adopt the platform security as well is very important and we have enterprise architecture and in enterprise architecture one of the most important component of enterprise architecture is the BPM Business Process Management and this video is not is in the context of BPM right yeah so and became is maybe not very clear to you but became means business process so Frances when you create an approval it's already your first kind of BPM but in many cases when you want to to do a task to perform a task connection it actually takes several steps not just one and the whole process the whole workflow is very important when companies want to be able to manage the old workgroup not just one specific task okay yep but creating a BPM tool is something which is very complex and it's very expensive but many problems in companies can be seized as a case it's a case that means there is a case that is created and the case go to a lifecycle and at the end the case is sold so we want to manage the whole process so I've defined something that I call the kids management pattern you remember John in the past he proposed the controller pattern case management pattern okay in case management approval oh very important but there is more than approval process if you have some someone to give feedback it's not an approval just a feedback could be a positive feedback or negative feedback it's not an approval is the person said it's no maybe you can go to the next step the whole workflow is not stop I'm sorry it's a bit more complex than this and I have noticed because my favorite product which is power automate well in power automate approval are fine for citizen development but not enough that too limited for business process management and and that's why I've created a free and an open-source reference implementation reputation that I will illustrate right right now so what I'm going to show you is a proof of concept and later on I will create something which is more generic and I will share it for free so just let's take a specific case that I recently had to solve for customer an HR request so there are many type of HR requests and they can be very very complex so example my customer that 7li type of HR request and each each each one request can follow different kind of walkthrough depending on the type of request and the whole approval process can take up to one year some can take one day one other other it can take one year if you take a leave request you say I want to take a five month leave request after four months you can say I want to extend it so that means the the requests take more than four months right so you should be able to still work on your request so you press the still pending also what I've noticed is that supervisors like HR office references and also loser want to see the next step what is the next step what happened if I have proof I approve we will have to approve but will happen if I put the comments in a probe in the process with my manager we will see the comment with the director of the company we will see the comment so people want some kind of clarity around the whole process so people want to a dashboard where they can monitor the whole process I mean they want to see everything and I can say I want to stop this one I want to start this one I want to redirect this one this won't take too long so we want a high-level view of what's going on and if you take a case of a leave request it can be very complex because the leave requests for medical reason can go first to be validated by a doctor so you need to provide some medical information to the doctor to it's highly confidential and then the legal department can check if your live request is right or just an option if it's a legal right one you should get it right and then it can be validated by your line manager and then you can go to another line manager process if this leave requests come from someone in Paris it will be validated by HR in Paris and then by the supervisor in Paris and then by a supervisor impressive and then funded by the directing person so it can be very complex and then some timing may have to go back to other steps okay so this is a normal business requirement and actually that's very complicated to do with or vote on it but it was until recently so if you get back to the Palmer ultimate approval the out-of-the-box approval that that you know and that you love right it works like this so let's say to take a simple case you have an array of approvers okay so verbal approvers with ten approvers anyone every every person in this array to approve so you can create a loop like this apply it to each other applying to each people in this array and then you can create an approval wait for approval but you know that by speaking this in two steps actually this one will generate code for AB active card it can send up two teams you can brand it that's very nice absolutely cool right then you wait for approval then you you know switch you check if it was proved if it was cancel or reject it and you go to the next so that works very well there is one issue here which is that if you do this you need to know that the flow cannot run for more than 30 days so if you want to keep it simple you can just have a grind branch here parallel then you check every day if you don't reach 28 and a 28 you just notify that a we are almost too late so do something right so that works but and when you send an approval to someone the person receives something like this okay an email can click on approve reject that's cool and when you click on approve you get to feel can put the comments at me and that works and also you have a dashboard that's what will approve and you can get back you can see you approval history etc that's fine for our citizen paper but we want more than that because there's some issue with this and then this issue will probably be fixed in the future the issue is I mentioned that before is that flow duration is maximum 30 days and I mentioned before that when HR requests can take up to one year but the proof of also 30 days you cannot easily cancel the flow so you can cancel it approval but ok cancel the whole walk through the step before and stop the step after write if your flow is already running in a loop you cannot easily cancel it right also in the canceling of an approval only the approval requester can do it so if the request is sent on the earth of mr. X only mr. Riggs can cancel this approval right someone you want other people to be able to cancel them you want to hold stuff to be able to cancel that they reach our staff winces so if you want to be able to cancel the flow in code you need to create a custom connector and there are some limitation as well but creating custom connector means that you need premium license some people can buy it other people cannot alright so let's talk about redirecting an approval redirecting approval means you redirect your proof to someone else so that means technically you you start working on a state machine you go to another state so that's important but in power automate only the user can redirect the request okay what we want is we want to supervisor the officer to be able to redirect any kind of nature request so and also let's say you get an approval and you are sick for two weeks what will happen all the work from will be pending me you're gonna be a bottleneck so you need to be able to delegate your task to someone else and not just you supervisors like a manager or each horse officer should be able to say mr. X is in holiday or mr. dicks is sick a one all is pending to us and future tasks between this week and that week to be redirected to another person that's normal business right and we cannot do that with power go to me so you can redirect the many limitation you need to create a custom connector and it's still very limited so my point is but actually if you follow this pattern what I've called a case management pattern it will work and the idea is the following use flow use perhaps but don't use the pour pour pour automate but when I say useful mm use power ultimate right but don't use the power ultimate approval for this kind of thing the idea is you need to list or to table in the first table you will store the requests and the HR requests each required each request can be store in this list could be a SharePoint list could hear the CD s entity could be the simple adder table and for each request the life cycle of the case will be store in another list or another table or another CVS entities whatever used but we call a case life cycle so example here step one will be managed by in first HR officer and then step two and then step three you have a new case then step one step two step three another case read here that wants to do supreme so yes you just need to list and this of everything you will see we see why I did it well let's see cricket oh that works okay okay because we have a long dream since the big enough for our ultimate we want to be able to create state machine we want to be able to manage all this stuff in a nice way remember that job that's your dream right that now you'll see what we've done all right cool okay so this is the proof of concept right and this is a SharePoint site I use a SharePoint site but actually in the real world people use just apps they never see SharePoint the information here will be stored in SharePoint everything is going to happen but you just interact with the app okay so any let's say someone create an H our request in this case it's a very simple request so you want to go to a city you want to visit the city and the city is Roma in Italy and in this workflow there are more compatible program I'm going to take a very simple one you want this expense to be validated by a set of users this guy okay so four four person then one actually five percent right so five days five I'm the first one here and you click on servant so your expense your request has been submitted and it will go to a life sign but it has been store in one list in this case of SharePoint list and then it will go to a life cycle you will see what exactly what I mean but John if you go to the dashboard if you go to dashboard you are a charc officer or your user you should be able to follow all processes or bathrooms or cases and actually this is dashboard you see this is the dashboard and in this dashboard you can see different type of workroom all cases all the workflow that have been approved all the workflow that are in waiting mode all work for in rejected all work for that a stock example Toronto there was a request for Toronto this one is still running it has been submitted this guy it's in green so it has been approved and then it switched to this guy he approved because it's in green and then it switched to this guy it's orange it's awaiting here and the next step which is not yet done is this guy so the workflow is waiting here so if you click on waiting you will see all the business process that are in waiting mode and you see the one I've just created the robots there it's running me and you know that you can see here graphically can you see that John Isaiah you get off my skirt yeah yeah the first user is surgical the second one is user one is in grey that means this will be the next one and then user to user three etc right you can even search here across every process what you want to search what is your favorite city in Europe my favorite city in Europe is Zurich Zurich and after Zurich Amsterdam after Zurich Amsterdam okay let's see if how maybe in all cases oh yes there was an expense on Amsterdam okay great that's good that's good so but actually we created one on Roma you remember it is running it is waiting for someone to improve so oh can we interact with this guy just click here and then we can work well as HR officer we can we can take a look at we can interact with this this business process and this is the work flow you see look we are here so the process is waiting for this guy to improve that means this guy is probably getting email so let's take a look at this image because I'm this guy so I can access the YouTube main books look at this it was a notification here so it does not look like the part of the books approval because the out-of-the-box approval in the poor ultimate is too limited we want to do more we want food branding so if you you see this is the email I got differently here if I click here you get our dream which is task forms look at that that's a task form fully branded task form with your company logo everything is branded you get all the details and you know what job what you are you have to improve and you want to know before approving before putting your comment like this before clicking on approve you want to check who's next in the walkthrough you can click here show graph click there and you can navigate to the flow I'm this guy and the next one is user one where it is my voice in there no so I can put a job there someone but yeah ok so it let's close this so it's fine for me I'm searched so it's fine for me let's go to the business process it will you see now it's green search little proof and even work better we have you see this sign mean there's a comment yeah you do the user can put the document can put an attachment one or several attachment if you get if you'd ever use an attachment you can see the attachment but here you see the comments I will put more metadata here but you can see the comments you know and and also this guy approved that means this the workflow switch to this guy so the workflow is waiting here you see the clock here yeah okay so and so this is a power app this is a power app right here yeah it's a port up okay so now I'm the HR officer so I'm working on the walkthrough and actually I say oh the user 1 user 1 is in holiday amen what should i do I mean is Allah gay well there are different possibilities I can skip this step I can go to the next one or I can reassign to another user you can even add a new step you can say eh oh I forgot use of five I mean he was supposed to be in a walkthrough I want to add user five so first let's say I want to skip business it can take several seconds if you buy a premium license it's instant it's faster yet if you don't have an insta premium license you have to wait a few seconds right that's the only difference so let's wait a little bit because normally the system automatically refresh but since we have a demo I want to go faster so you will see now a few seconds user to should become in Waiting mode if I go to the dashboard where is the roma roma is there let's refresh the dashboard you can see oh yeah user yeah it's already arranged there in a green air fresh yeah yeah yeah user Tuesday right now you can say hey I won I want to reassign that to another user reassign that to this guy user five yeah I should be able to type and to retrieve email automatically but Oh I haven't done that yet let's say user five yeah click on confirm so user too should become user five right so you say if we can be paid as well you see now if i refresh its user five right that works all right let's say you know you forget the user you say oh I did forget to add mr. bean I want to add mr. bean here let's add a new step after user five otherwise it would be very angry so let's put user seven after this one yes after this one look John you have a dynamic workflow your workflow is living creator user seven is there isn't that wonderful is there anything yeah it's crazy you're already running right so let's say no because I want to prove you that it works I'm here I want to get back there oh I want to that means I want to redirect this guy to this guy because I need some additional information so you want to go there where step zero this is step zero I want to go to step zero confirm it's working at me I heard the email ding you get your email right so this waiting is an email right so that works here soon that's crazy yeah isn't that for dream state machines that's not sad Wow and it's all I mean any you did this all in SharePoint this is all powered by SharePoint all the data is pouring SharePoint is push SharePoint poor automate and perhaps don't show you all that words behind okay okay yeah I'm interested to see how this works now cuz I'm like yeah no you can say okay here look work for stopped and it's black interesting if you go to the dashboard you will see it's black it's black it's black stop officer Roma nice yeah and then let's say I want to remove this all what you see it stop here what do we move to all GoPro because I don't want to see it anymore remove that so it removed if you go to do that port he wants your oh my anymore you won't in Rome anymore you see okay soit's wow isn't that great that's pretty crazy yeah I'm still like I'm still wondering how this all works and and in the fact that it's built on SharePoint is kind of crazy to me cuz I mean there's gotta be some relational information happening somewhere and and so I'm curious as to like do you you built your own relationships between lists so do you want to organize an OTB mode to see how it works what you want to see it right now let's see right now let's see right okay okay yeah yeah so just just nothing to you guys to you to use this you don't need any premium license right so you don't have to pay anything well you have to pay your office subscription just your office with my subsequent if you want more of course you can buy premium feature you can buy CES because it's more scalable and also the CES security model is different the benefit of doing that but you can start from this I mean and now I will show you how that works so let's close this because I want it to be simple I want it to be simple and let's go to power ups calm and and in the solution so I have one solution I've call that approval factory so it's gonna be BPM factor in the future okay and that is one thing first I need to show you the data structure also we'll get back to the social I have to resist here well actually I f3 listed the first is the one when you store the cases so let's take a look at that you see cattle furnaces Roma should be somewhere yeah Roma is there you see that's list for the kids of course you might have you might need modern properties for each case you have one medicated least right oh one handy teensy yes if you want to use it yes it's actually exactly the same so that's for the kid and the second list is the case lifecycle let's take a look at the case life cycle so for each case this is a case number you have a common steps so you can see the steps you can see the status for each step you can get the comment you can get attachment you can see who is in charge of the step you see track and we have it evert third list which is the workflow trace which is for each case so for each row Pro I've global status you see actually how to attack if it's it's running if it's rejected if it's you see and that's what I'm using to display things in the dashboard and so now this is going to be populated when the flow the first and agri-food oh okay I've to main flow I have the flow that I call the case generator so when you put a new case in the case list the case generator start and basically the case generator generate the workflow generate the step in the lifecycle list so the workflow is not flow the workflow is actually the steps in the rest so it's you can see that as a meter walk through meter flow you see the water is in the data and I've got a case in it but if you take a look at that one you see when an item is creating the list in which list in the in the case list then basically yeah I know delegation because you someone can be negate it starts another user right but I fitted your provers I initialize a book in here i generate the steps that's where I generate the steps for each approver I created I stepped in the list of steps and you see yo this this these things here will become a dedicated walkthrough because this is fine for the kind of workflow I show you which is you ask a set of people to approving in serial so it's pretty basic case and the most popular case but but what we want is we may have to live with different type of work rules so you should be able to create your in the pattern walk through and to hook up your own custom work from in there so you have a flow generating other flows I generated with a set of step and the flow just execute the step interesting okay okay and so this actually this because it's this is version one it's a proof of concept this one will become another flow this is we move in under the flow and you can create your own depending on your type of algorithm you want to use you can pick up and then you start for the first approver and then and then the second main flow is case lifecycle what happened if there is a new approval when you were proving the approval request rejection etc this start so if something new happen in your proven list this start however you should not start all the time you should start only if the if it's a proof if the the new information the proof if the status is a proof or the status is is rejected or if it's canceled or or skip or something like that you see so there is a trigger that trigger a filter and then and then voila I mean the system check and execute you know steps so this is very very generic and actually it's very simple it's very simple but that's the point it's simple I will explain that in the blog post is he fine next step if no next step do something said the world there is no next up anymore then set the workroom it's done everybody ever prove do something oh there was another step then go to the next step you see so so this is the second flow that I will explain later with more details okay and and now I don't remember to cancel a walkthrough or to redirect to walk through the only option that we have today not of the books is to create custom custom crater what though I don't have cause I'm connective I don't want to do that if this first that mean people need to buy premium second it's too complicated you don't not easily associate code with that so for each action level it's different it's true look you want to skip or reassign that's a fruit you want to stop the case or that's another flow you want to remove the kids that's another fruit you want to redirect to another state state machine that's interesting and then what's what is what's the master to kind of call in these is it the app that's then mastering all these various folks or is it another hello it's it's just the flu you putting information in the list the flow is trigger and the certain life cycle analyze information so there's no master that start anything it's read through the road it's about you see so they're all independent absolutely interesting a very scalable there's no limitation in time they can run ten years if you want ah very interesting patient at all so I've bypassed all the limitations in the task form the state machine the direction while everything I mean [Music] because flow opera automate is a very very powerful tool especially when associated with poor ups now I can show you for instance the approval flow or the dashboard what do you want to see the dashboard yeah I was gonna say let's let's look at the apps a little bit okay let's look at the apps so here I have a screen and in my screen have a gallery okay and in the gallery have another gallery so each workflow is a knife is a gallery so it's a got me in a gallery you see so I check the state to state to soft let's go there you see the circle yeah I check the status of item the color is depend on me to state the stages I mean so you have to be very simple okay this is Adam my KPIs you see can be a you see the number of case that all cases now - six waiting that result mean this is quite simple search as well I mean let's take a look at the task for yes okay man I'm blown away by this is kuzey I like how you've rebuilt our entire system with our tools that's right so process the tasks form and I've could not approve reject but it's more than approve reject because sometime you don't you cannot approve reject sometime it's just keep putting feedback so let me show you this form okay this is my task phone you see and this is the so of course the state depends on the status of dream the approval if it's already approve this will be great right so process if you click on graph shown graph you member yep so the graph will be visible what is the graph the graph is this guy here the gallery and display your steps I didn't drink that correctly because I'm gonna do that in the generic version but you see nice man okay galleries inside galleries displaying each flow as a separate piece displaying each column as a separate piece man this is a this took you a lot of time to think of the room no no no not not to put together but to I can't I can imagine how much time it took to think through stitching all of this together right - to think of all of your prereqs and what needs to go in the lists to think of how the app will power these flows to think of how it all gets displayed I think you know it's a marvel in how you've actually used all of the pieces of the platform and tied them together like this now I can tell by looking at it once you had your plan it probably wasn't that hard to go and make which is the Uni of this OS I was surprised by myself because it was it was very easy we should have done that two years ago I mean we had everything to do that - let's see what was missing was child flu child flow is very important but yeah because no I need to make that more generic because I want to talk about the the road map of this thing okay what you're doing next yeah exactly so okay I have many things on my plate and so first this is a proof of concept because I have a customer and the customer actually my customer use PeopleSoft they have people so they want to move away from people stuff it's a big company and and then one they asked me to do these in share points so I mean they didn't want to buy premium prices and I have to find a way to solve a issue that's why I did this gotcha on my on my free time by the way yeah otherwise the project would stop and so so first I wanted to be free so I wanted to be open source so it will end up in given so anyone should be able to use the clean generate version nice so you're gonna hold on real real quick let's not move on from that you're going to genera side to generalize this and give it away yeah absolutely awesome that's great news I love that okay cool oh yeah that's that's the point I mean very cool yeah so also when you think about the case pattern case management by default there are many analytics that you need to provide by given you need to know how many case you have what cases are pending all only took two to do the same the old process every process who is a bottleneck in the chain right so you need to improve your business process so there are some busy analytics that you need to provide so we provided and for this to the very will for me with me or so you've seen that I can redirect to a previous step so technically it's state machine right yeah I mean it now not truly but it works that way right yeah you want to go to another step right so right any chance can you go so it's there to another state yeah yeah but you want that to be visible in the graph I want to see the redirection picture so that's okay also yeah also I want to work on the rocky that means the responsibility assignment matrix you need to define roles who can see what who can interact with the dashboard we can act on the dashboard so a responsibility assignment matrix should be defined actually also some custom don't want me to use hideous instead of Chevron list anyway I would provide a bridge to see yes if they want to use synchronizer they can as well you know what wherever your data lives you should get to use power automate exactly portal rate is key for everything that's right we do for everything that's right security model is also very good because someone put HR request in the case list so only this person and the manager can see this information but now that's what week that's what we love cycle exactly in the lifestyle not everyone can sue can see anything your answer in future so we need to the sign you mean - let's just say that with a security move okay that different type of workroom so what I'm showing is a serial walkthrough but you might have different type of workroom so extension point so you should be able to create a walkthrough and to hook it up to the system so what for generator compliance because we need to put an OD trace on everything if you want it to be using big companies everything should be compliant so compliance is very important we need to be more generic so more parameters and so on for instance you can say yeah when it's when a workflow is waiting I want the color to be blue forces instead of orange to be able to define it without having to change the code that's single example but there are many other things like this I want to minimize human approval because I mean sometimes you ask too many people to approve or reject well I mean the reality is oftentimes approvals don't make your business more efficient they make it less efficient right the less approvals you have the more quickly you can move but now and there's a there's that there's a tipping point obviously but that's it's a pretty much the rule yeah exactly especially one the person that proof is in the early days yeah or like it doesn't impact that's why you can redirect you can delegate your task person so I want to use machine learning to bypass some approval machine should be able to say hey this guy always approved oh I would escape this guy it's a little different so I want also to alert supervisor because if something strange happened example if all the flow are in waiting state for the same person that's something unusual so there is something unusual so you need to be able to provide some intelligence oh I want to alert the staff tell this person to move their ass yeah move urs or delegate to someone else so do so and also you need to be able to have stages running in parallel I want to see parallel stages and with connection point between these things run in the parlor nice right so that's in the roadmap okay in much much more John that's a big roadmap man yeah so let's see awesome awesome okay Wow Joe thank you okay let me wrap this up a little bit so okay so what I saw here is a completely encapsulated office solution that will cost you nothing above your current office subscription it's all powered by sharepoint on the backend its visualized and controlled with apps it has a bunch of flows doing a bunch of things and and what I really want people to get across from this is two things one surge is going to open source this it will be on github we'll put it in the community you'll be able to download this and play with it but in the meantime though what I really hope is that you see the possibilities I hope that it opens your mind to hey wait a second I've been thinking about this too small I can orchestrate much bigger things and what Serge did here is he did the free version but you can actually simplify your life too if you want to pay some money there is c.d.s which gives you all of this data structure out-of-the-box there is business process flows which give you many of these stages and things that Serge is breaking down there's a lot of technology that's already in the stack that will give you some of what's been built here with less effort and so if spending dollars instead of effort is your way take a look at some of those things but if effort is your way then Serge has given you an awesome way forward here on what's possible and how you can kind of look at these pieces to put something like this together what do you think Serge was that a good wrap-up that's a good look can I say something please yeah now many feature here that you don't have in BBF you yes that's true it's it's on its way yeah yep cool thank you thank you sir really appreciate you being here today for you guys at home go ahead and check the description I'll have links for Serge there his Twitter his blog be sure and follow him also go and check out flow in a day if you haven't already he's got that up on github he's working on a new version and yeah click like click subscribe hit that Bell so that you don't miss any more awesome videos from us and that's it much love see [Music]

Channel: Jon Levesque

Views: 7,882

Rating: 4.9333334 out of 5

Keywords: jon levesque, jon levesque microsoft, microsoft flow bpf, flow bpf, business process flow, microsoft flow tutorial, power automate, power automate tutorial, microsoft power automate, microsoft flow, microsoft flow approval workflow, microsoft power automate approvals, microsoft flow approvals, microsoft flow approval multiple approvers, microsoft flow approval sharepoint list item, microsoft flow approval demo, microsoft flow approval dashboard, flow approval, approvals

Id: NSHKVZXVxYI

Length: 44min 49sec (2689 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020