Visual Process Flows for Sage 300 ERP 2014

chris.huan

Introduction

We introduced Visual Process Flows with Sage 300 ERP 2012. This has been quite a popular feature since it lets you customize people’s desktop to exactly match their real workflow in a friendly intuitive graphic manner. Several other Sage ERP product incorporate the same Visual Process Flow common desktop component including Sage 100 ERP and Sage X3 ERP. A great number of ERP type products have nice graphical tools to launch screens, but a key differentiator of our Visual Process Flows is that they aren’t fixed and hard-coded into the product. You can edit all the existing Process Flows and you can create as many new ones as you like. Then you can assign specific Visual Process Flows to the various users in your organization.

Sage 300 ERP 2014 is now in alpha testing and will be shown at the upcoming Sage Summit conference in Washington, DC. With this release we are adding a number of improvements to the Visual Process Flow features.

New Visual Process Flows

Sage 300 ERP 2014 will be bundled with three new Visual Process Flows. The first one is for Project and Job Costing Transactions shown below:



Then we have on for Canadian Payroll Transactions and another for US Payroll Transactions. Below is the screen shot for the Canadian Payroll one. Notice that I resized the tree of icons down to zero width so you only see the Process Flow. This way you can do away with the tree of icons entirely and run entirely from Visual Process Flows.



Desktop Customization

Generally, you use the provided Visual Process Flows as starting points and then customize them to exactly match the roles within a company. With Sage 300 ERP 2012 you can only add elements to Visual Process Flows that run standard existing UIs. There wasn’t a mechanism to run the other sorts of objects you can add to the Sage 300 Desktop.

With Sage 300 ERP 2014, you can now add and run Crystal Reports, VBA Macros and arbitrary EXE programs just like you can directly from the bare Desktop. When you are have a Process Flow in Edit mode you can now select these as link types and specify them in the designer. Generally you do this by using the Browse (…) button in the Link… dialog.



This way if you have Macros (perhaps custom screens) or custom reports you can include these in a user’s workflow.

Running Other Process Flows

Another ability we’ve added is to run one Visual Process Flow from another. This give you the ability to provide links to common functions as well as create Visual Process Flows with many pages. You could even re-create the Sage 300 ERP Desktop with a Process Flow for each group of icons (with better graphics) and then link them all together to replace the tree of icons entirely.

If a user has multiple roles, you could produce a master page with all their job functions and then each one of these runs a Process Flow for the individual functions. Basically allowing you to automate larger processes than you could before.

Summary

Visual Process Flows were introduced in Sage 300 ERP 2012 and with the upcoming Sage 300 ERP 2014 we are adding quite a few enhancements to make these even better.