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Corporate Addressing is a feature within Fitech which allows an organisation or 'application' to have a multi-tiered architecture. This feature is usually only relevant to large corporate customers. The default setting is therefore not to use corporate addressing. You can only turn 'corporate addressing' on or off in the administration menu. In order to be able to do this, you must be of a sufficiently high security level. In most cases this would be an 'Application Administrator'.
There are 4 Areas where Corporate Addressing is evident and/or needs to be configured.
1. It needs to be enabled in the Administration Area (Application Administrators) & the Captions declared.
2. The various levels need to be added to the system by the Administrator
3. The various fields to input the data then appear on both the Quick Add and 'Normal' Subject insert and update forms.
4. The results of the inputs are then displayed on the Subject Personal Detials Tab. (see Figure 3)
In order to explain corporate addressing, it is useful to follow through a worked example. Let's consider a company called 'Acme Widgets Inc'. This company is a large corporate with offices all over the world. They operate within the engineering sector and specialise in engines. They have a company structure that is split into the following architecture:
- Many Divisions
- Each Division has one or more Departments
- Each Department can have one or more Locations assigned to it
Fitech corporate addressing can support this architecture. This architecture is represented visually below in figure 1.
figure 1 - corporate addressing hierarchy
Points to note are:
- Each Level is given a caption, this means that whatever the business area of the organisation or the architecture can be correctly or logically described. The Top Level Caption is for the Organisation itself. In this case, we have chosen 'Company' to to be the caption which appears on forms. It could easily be 'Organisation' or 'University' or 'HM Ship'. Captions are set from the administration area after clicking 'Manage <Your Organsiation>' where <Your Organisation> is the actual name of your organisation within Fitech
- By default the field which is marked using the Top Level Caption is prefilled with your Organisation. In this case, if you look at Figure 1, (B), you will see the Top Level Caption is 'Company' and the field is prefilled with 'Ace Widgets Inc'. The value, 'Ace Widgets Inc' can be changed if required.
- (A) shows on the Manage Organisation Form where the captions are declared. (B) Shows how those captions and fields are presented in the Quick Add Feature available to operators.
- Figure 3 shows how the final information is dislayed after loading a subject to work with.
Setting up Corporate Addressing Levels.
Turning on Corporate Addressing is simply a matter of logging on as the Application Administrator and then going to the Administration Menu using the cog icon on the icon toolbar. Once in the administration menu, click on the Manage 'My Company Name' link which is the first link in the list. From there, the administrator can edit the properties of the company. One of these options is 'Corporate Addressing' and the radio button options are yes or no.
The different levels are created within the Administration Area. In this case the link form the Admin Menu is 'Manage Divisions, Depts and Locations' The administrator must then create all levels and links. This is important otherwise the levels will not be available for picking when adding or editing a subject. It is a tasak that needs some thought and planning to ensure all the data is present. It is also important to ensure that the Data Analysis module is provided with the correct data in order to make calculations.
How the Captions are Used / Displayed.
Figure 3. below shows how the captions are displayed on the Subject Details Page.
figure 3 - Captions on the Subject Edit Form
In this case you can see that the Top Level information was amended to show 'Ace Widgets Inc (AU)' rather than 'Ace Widgets Inc'
A Word About Captions / Corporate Addressing
- You can turn Corporate Addressing on and on at any time. However, it may cause unexpected problems when performing group data analysis.
- If you are going to use Corporate Addressing, think about the hierarchy seriously and implement it once only!
- Editing the captions is less likely to cause a problem than turning it of and on.
