What is Types of flows

There are three primary types of Power Automate flows:

• Business process flows: These flows are used in model-driven apps to help people get work done. They provide a streamlined user experience that leads people through the processes their organization defined for interactions that need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind.
• Cloud flows: These are the most commonly used flows. Cloud flows begin with a trigger such as receiving an email from a specific person, or a mention of your company in social media. Once triggered, they also generally include one or more actions such as creating a record in a different system or sending an approval request to someone.
• Desktop flows – These robotic process automation (RPA) flows allow you to record yourself performing actions on your desktop or within a web browser. You can then trigger a flow to perform that process for you. You can also pass data in or get data out of the process, letting you automate even “manual” business processes.

Business process flows

Business process flows are mostly used in model-driven applications to help users get work done. They typically represent a process that a user follows through to completion. They provide a streamlined user experience to provide them with the best way to advance to a conclusion of some kind.

Some common scenarios where organizations might use business process flows are:

• Sales Process: Organizations can create sales focused business process flows that guide sellers through the entire sales process ensuring that they are following the organization proven sales procedures for maximizing their chance of winning the deal.
• Case Resolution: Support centers might create service centered business process flows that guide agents through the process of creating a case, troubleshooting the case, and ultimately resolving the case.
• Event Planning: An event planning company might use a business process flows to ensure that they are not missing a step when they are planning an event. Stages in the process can exist for booking the venue, planning the meal, defining entertainment details and more.
• Selling a home: A real estate company might use a business process flow to assist their agents in getting a home ready for an open house. This might include having stages for capturing inspection details, staging the property, and coordinating with staff to ensure someone is available at the time.

In the image, we see an example of a business process flow used to help guide an agent through the process of fielding an offer from a potential buyer.

During each stage, there’s information that needs to be logged. Based on the information captured, the stages of the business process flow might change. For example, since the Counter Offer field is set to yes, the counter offer stage appears. If the Counter Offer field was set to no, the stage wouldn’t appear.