Let me paint you a picture. Last year, I walked into a manufacturing company running D365 F&O. They had 47 active workflows. Forty-seven. Most of them were variations of approval processes that could have been consolidated into maybe eight logical flows.
Every workflow execution costs you. Every time the system checks conditions, evaluates rules, sends notifications – that's compute time, storage operations, API calls. This particular client was processing roughly 2,300 workflow instances daily. The scary part? About 1,400 of those were completely unnecessary.
The fix that saved them $8,200 annually:- Consolidated similar approval workflows using conditional branching
- Implemented bulk processing for routine operations instead of individual triggers
- Added proper timeout configurations to prevent infinite loops
- Moved non-critical notifications to batch processing
The performance improvement was immediate. Response times dropped by 35%, and their monthly Azure consumption decreased by roughly $680.
Now, I'm not saying you should eliminate all workflows – that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But every workflow should justify its existence. If you can't explain why a particular process needs real-time automation versus batch processing, you probably shouldn't be paying real-time prices.