SugarCRM Process Author Demystified – SugarCRM 7.6 Review

January 24, 2016

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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 ?

Instead of going into the jargon, let us look how can we used Sugar Process Author.

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.

Process Author can be used to create the list of cities that belong to each of your offices in Singapore, 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. Once it is allocated you can also create couple of acknowledgment email templates and send an automatic email to the lead as well as the the sales executive to whom it has been assigned.

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.

Processes Module

A Process is a running instance of the Process Definition. For example if we create a Process Definition for Quotes Discount Approval, every time a quote has a status that triggers this Process Definition, an instance is created.

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

A business process rule is set of conditions and outcomes that are defined based on the data that is available for the module / modules on which the process definition is applied. If leads that have the city mentioned as Singapore, needs to be allocated to the Singapore local team and any other leads should be allocated to overseas sales team, business process rule needs to be created accordingly.

Process Email Templates Module

A Process Email Template is used whenever the process business rule needs to send a message to the user or actor. Sugar does have the standard email template module but for process definition to pick the email, it must be created using Process Email Template module only.

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.

If you want SugarCRM Process Author Training or a few workflows to be defined, one of our executives can help you.