Sales Chart

Sales Pipeline Charts not updating in Dynamics 365 – The Solution

John PhillipsProduct Updates

The problem

You may have noticed that your Sales Pipeline charts are no longer updating following a recent Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement update. This is due to Microsoft changing the way Business Process Flows interact with records in Dynamics 365. Essentially, multiple Business Process Flows can exist for the same Opportunity at the same time. This means that two different parts of your organisation may have their own Business Process Flow running at the same time, so you could have your standard sales process for your sales team, but your legal team may want their own Business Process Flow to manage any contractual information running alongside the sales process.

The reason

Previously, however, only one Business Process Flow could be active at any one time, and that would update the Sales Stage which feeds into the Sales Pipeline chart. With multiple teams running multiple Business Process Flows, you may only want one of those to actually affect the Sales Pipeline.

The solution

So what now? The good news is that it’s straight forward to get this working again! Dynamics 365 now creates a new entity for each of your Business Process Flows (meaning you can also add security to each one!). If you create a new workflow for that Business Process Flow entity to trigger on the process being applied, or the Active Stage changing. Then it’s simply a case of updating the linked Opportunity to update the Pipeline Phase with the correct name.

Three things to note:

  1. You will need to do this for every Business Process Flow that will need to update the Pipeline Phase record (out of the box you would need to update the Opportunity Sales Process and the Lead to Opportunity Sales Process).
  2. You will want to make sure you are numbering the Pipeline Phase in the same order as is currently in the system: this is because the pipeline report itself uses the initial number to do the ordering of the phases.
  3. You will need to run this as an on-demand process on any existing open opportunities to ensure that all of them have the correct Pipeline Phase on them.

If you would like any more information on this, or need any assistance in making these changes, please drop Strategy 365 an email.

Solution steps –

  1. Create a workflow that runs against the Business Process Flow you want to track Sales progress against:
    Business Process Flow Workflow
  2. For each Pipeline stage, update the Opportunity accordingly:
    Updating the Opportunity Record