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Microsoft has established a business process catalog of standard business processes across Dynamics 365 apps and services. The term business process covers a wide range of structured, often sequenced, activities or tasks to achieve a predetermined organizational goal. The term can also refer to the cumulative effects of all steps progressing toward a business goal.

Business processes are particular to solutions that include Dynamics 365. We believe this new content type creates a structure that helps customers and partners be better prepared to adopt Dynamics 365. Each business process includes a diagram of a standard business process flow. Sections of the document outline configuration steps and the data entities used in each one. Each step links to the relevant page in the prod…

Read on to learn how to navigate and learn from the catalog.

What is the catalog?

The business process catalog is an Excel workbook that we generate from an internal tool that we at Microsoft use to define and organize the business process documentation. We share the catalog as an Excel workbook because it makes it easy to sort and filter the entries. We also believe our partners can use the Excel workbook to organize their onboarding journeys, their implementation projects, and their own business processes. Learn more about the content in the What’s in the catalog? section. And learn about how to use the catalog at Implement a solution based on your business processes.

The business process catalog assigns unique IDs to each end-to-end scenario and the related child entries that support that end-to-end scenario. On the Microsoft Learn site, we use the IDs to list the end-to-end scenarios, but we don’t use the IDs of the related business process areas, business processes, scenarios, system processes, and test cases. Learn more in the Catalog IDs section.

Download the latest version of the catalog from https://aka.ms/BusinessProcessCatalog. We update the catalog at least four times each year. Learn more at Business process contributions.

What’s in the catalog?

The catalog defines six levels of content:

End-to-end processes

An end-to-end process represents the complete flow of activities from the initial trigger to the final outcome. It encompasses all the intermediate steps and subprocesses that are necessary to achieve the business objective. We’ve identified 15 end-to-end scenarios. We describe the scenarios in business terms, not in terms of software technology.

For each end-to-end process, the introductory article describes how we think about the end-to-end process. We list the key stakeholders and how Dynamics 365 helps the end-to-end process. We also provide an overview, along with a business process flow diagram, of how the end-to-end process interacts with other end-to-end processes. The introduction lists the prerequisites for implementing a solution to support the end-to-end process. 1.

Business process areas

Each end-to-end scenario covers two or more business process areas. This level represents a significant grouping of related activities that contribute to the overall objective, and it provides a logical way to group business processes. In most cases, the business process areas are separated by major job functions or departments in an organization. Currently, the catalog defines more than 100 business process areas. 1.

Business processes

The term business process covers a wide range of structured, often sequenced, activities or tasks to achieve a predetermined organizational goal. The term can also refer to the cumulative effects of all steps progressing toward a business goal. Each business process describes a function or process that Dynamics 365 supports. So far, we’ve identified more than 800 business processes. Some apply to a single Dynamics 365 app, and the documentation for the app might already describe the process. By collecting all business processes here in the guide, we hope to provide a single entry point with links to relevant product-specific content. 1.

Scenarios

In Dynamics 365, scenarios are patterns of repeatable configurations that support a specific business process. They include the most common use cases, scenarios, and industries. Often, there are many ways to implement Dynamics 365 to meet your business requirements. Our goal with patterns is to provide a baseline for your implementation. We’ve identified more than 3000 scenarios and patterns, and we expect that number to grow over time. 1.

System processes

A system process is a portion of a business process that uses a specific form, page, or UI element in Dynamics 365. 1.

Test cases

A test case is a detailed set of conditions and steps used to determine whether a software application or system functions correctly. It is an essential part of the software testing process, designed to ensure that the software meets its requirements and performs as expected. Test cases are used to identify defects, ensure quality, and verify that the software behaves as intended under various conditions.

Learn more at Overview of the business process catalog levels.

We plan to cover each level of the catalog. The result will be guidance about how to configure Dynamics 365 to meet most use cases and scenarios. Our goal is to help our customers and partners define the scope of their implementation projects. Start from our standard business processes, and accelerate your success and implementation. We hope you can then focus on the processes that make your business unique. Work with your implementation partner to identify which business processes and patterns are relevant at the beginning of your project. Also, review the Processes solution architecture design pillar.

New and updated content publishes to Microsoft Learn every week, usually on Tuesdays.

How to read the business process descriptions

The business process articles contain abbreviations that you won’t see anywhere else. The abbreviations represent the different Dynamics 365 apps, services, and related portals. We hope they make it easier to quickly scan the various tables. Get an introduction to this type of shorthand at Business processes, steps, and how to find things.

Business process flow diagrams

Each article, be it for an end-to-end scenario or a pattern, includes a diagram that shows how that business process fits into the work of a typical organization. We share the diagrams as Visio files with source data in Excel workbooks in a GitHub repo. This way, each organization can choose to download a flow diagram and customize it to fit their particular workflow.

Find the source files at https://aka.ms/businessprocessflow.

Note

When you navigate to the specified link, you can’t view the .vsdx or .xlsx files in GitHub. Instead, you can download the files by opening the file’s page on GitHub, then selecting the View raw or Download raw file option.

Catalog IDs

When you download the business process catalog, you’ll find each entry assigned a unique ID. The IDs start with a number for each end-to-end scenario. Each level below the end-to-end scenario has an ID that starts with the ID of each parent entry.

For example, let’s look at the administer to operate end-to-end scenario. The following table provides a quick introduction to how IDs are generated based on four entries in the business process catalog from December 2025.

Level	ID	Description
End-to-end scenario	99	ID for the end-to-end scenario, administer to operate.
Business process areas overview	99.10	ID for the business process area Define business continuity plan that is part of the administer to operate end-to-end scenario.
Business process	99.10.010	ID for the business process Define business continuity objectives that is part of the Define business continuity plan business process area.
Scenario	99.10.010.100	ID for the pattern Understand Dynamics 365 RTO and RPO that is part of the Define business continuity objectives business process.

The IDs of the end-to-end scenarios are similar to the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes that the U.S. government assigns to business establishments to identify the primary business of the establishment. The first two digits of a SIC code defines the major industry group that a business belongs to. Learn more at What is a SIC Code?.

For industries across the world, the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) is the international reference classification of productive activities. It provides a set of activity categories that can be utilized for the collection and reporting of statistics according to such activities. Learn more at Department of Economic and Social Affairs at United Nations.

But an end-to-end scenario can apply to businesses across two or more industries. So the IDs are not the same as SIC or ISIC codes. It’s the system of hierarchies of unique IDs that we loosely base on the ISIC and SIC categories. The only exception is the Administer to operate end-to-end scenario that got its ID 99 from the SIC code for Administration of Nonclassifiable Establishments.

You can use Microsoft’s business process catalog as a template that you import into a project in Azure DevOps Services to manage your Dynamics 365 implementation project. You can also import the catalog into Mavim, for example. Learn more at Use the business process catalog as a template in Azure DevOps Services and Import the business process catalog in Mavim using a Power Automate flow, respectively.

To subscribe to a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed of all updates to the Dynamics 365 guidance content, use the following link:

RSS

Note

The RSS feed returns a list of the 100 articles most recently updated. The list is sorted by date, but it can take up to a week before the most recently updated articles make it to the list.

Contribute

Internally at Microsoft, we’re working hard to convert internal notes, years of experience, and various documents into business process guidance. We very much welcome contributions from the community. Help us establish patterns, identify business processes, or provide alternatives.

If you want to contribute to the business processes, register your work before you start to reduce the risk that someone else is working on the same business process. To register your work, submit a GitHub issue at https://github.com/microsoft/dynamics365patternspractices/issues.

The GitHub repo contains Word templates that you can use to capture your contribution. All Word templates are in the /templates/business-processes folder. The folder also contains a PowerPoint template that can help you design the diagrams you need. Alternatively, use Visio or another designer.