SugarCRM has been trying hard to show differentiation between SugarCRM Professional Edition and the Enterprise Edition for quite sometime. The price difference of 25 USD Per User Per Month between SugarCRM Professional (that costs you 40 USD per user per Month) and Enterprise (that costs you 65 USD per use per month) needs to be justified. Process Author that has been made part of 7.6 release might become the key differentiator that justifies the price difference.
What is SugarCRM Process Author?
Sugar Process Author is a business process management(BPM) tool that allows you to create your workflows from a cool visual editor. If you are not familiar with the words BPM (Business Process Management) and BPL(Business Process Language), you can just understand Sugar Process Author as a workflow creation tool.
This tool is going to replace the existing workflow automation tool with complete visual tool.
How will Sugar Process Author be useful?
Skipping the jargon for now, let’s dive right into how Sugar Process Author can empower you to create powerful workflows.
If you have a team 20 sales people and they are all distributed across 3 to 4 geographies like US, Singapore, India and Europe. And let us say your website generates quite a few leads regularly. If the leads are too many and manually distributing them is difficult, you can add the customer city as one of the fields in the website form.
You can use Process Author to create a list of the cities where each of your offices are located in Singapore, the US, India, and Europe. Based on the city the website visitor belongs you can automatically allocate the lead to the corresponding team and a specific sales person responsible for that region.
After you allocate a lead, you can create a couple of acknowledgment email templates. Then, you can automatically send an email to both the lead and the assigned sales executive. Some of the business processes that you can automate using Sugar Process Author are Quote and Invoice Approvals, Quote Discount Approvals, Lead Routing, Customer Support Case Routing, Automated Reminders and Automated Escalations.
What does Process Author of Sugar Enterprise include?
The Process Author suite features an extensive set of modules that help in creating and managing fully functioning workflows without touching the code.
Process Definitions Module
A process definition defines the steps involved in the business process as a series of activities that get triggered based on the activities. The activities that are part of the process definition are called the participating activities.
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Processes Module
A Process is a running instance of the Process Definition. Upon encountering a status that triggers the Quotes Discount Approval Process Definition, a quote automatically prompts the creation of a new process instance.
If there are 10 quotes that are created by different users and all of them need the approval, as long as the approval is not completed, a unique process is available in this module.
Based on who needs to see that process, Process are visible to the corresponding users.
Processes Views
All these processes are viewed in Processes List View, Processes Dashlet and Process Management Page. The dash let gives an indication for the approver, how many quotes are to be approved by him.
Process Business Rules Module
Based on the data available in the related modules, a business process rule automatically defines conditions and outcomes for the process. Upon seeing Singapore listed as a lead’s city, the rule promptly assigns them to the local team. For any other leads, it assigns them to the overseas sales team.
Process Email Templates Module
When a process business rule needs to send a message to a user or actor, it triggers the use of a Process Email Template. Although Sugar provides a standard email template module, only templates built within the Process Email Template module are compatible with process definitions.
A lot of workflow automation can happen with the process author modules. To know more about Process Author please click SugarCRM Administrator Guide.
Bhea is SugarCRM Elite Partner with close to a decade experience in SugarCRM Implementation. You can contact us for any SugarCRM related Services like Installation, Customisation, Development, Deployment and Training.
Our executives can train you on SugarCRM Process Author or define a few workflows for you.
Let our expertise empower your success. Contact us now, and a Business Executive will be in touch from one of our offices in Singapore, New York, or Bangalore.
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