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Multi companies
Posted: 23 Nov 08 4:51 PM
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Dear All
Does SalesLogix support multi companies ?
I mean more than on company, if so how? |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 23 Nov 08 6:32 PM
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"Does SalesLogix support more than one company?" - this question does not make any sense to me. What do you mean? Can more than one company access the same database? Please elucidate.
Phil |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 24 Nov 08 11:31 AM
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| Our company is effectively six separate regional entities, which are very like companies, and in my opinion SalesLogix doesn't really have any support for this sort of setup. We have reused some fields in ACCOUNT/CONTACT/OPP to indicate the associated office, to allow grouping, but not much more. |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 24 Nov 08 2:13 PM
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Stuart, I don't see the issue here, you can have a high level account and utiize the division field to seperate the different divisions and associate them through the association tab
If your talking about using the system internall through the different companies you can set each company as a team and actually seperate out accounts/opportunities anything really by seccodeId.
This will still provide you with gross company reporting. |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 24 Nov 08 2:29 PM
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I agree that there's nothing much (if anything) OOTB to differentiate between users based on their company. In fact, I am going to be writing some mods soon that automatically perform some selection and grouping of an account's History and Attachment items based on the current user's Division (accounts are shared between different divisions of this client, so there is a tendency for clutter in these areas).
But it depends on the requirement to a large extent. If your A/C/O records are shared between entities, your approach is surely fraught with problems? What would you like the system to do?
Phil |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 24 Nov 08 3:25 PM
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Dear Thanks for your reply
Yes, What I want is that there is main company that manage 4 companies.
Can SalesLogix support this case? |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 24 Nov 08 3:34 PM
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Maybe not in its vanilla form - it depends on what you mean by 'support'.
Sure you can get your users all logging in to the same database and have them accessing the same accounts/contacts etc. But if you have various requirements regarding security, different users seeing different fields etc etc they will have to be tackled one by one.
SalesLogix can support almost any scenario you care to dream up: some scenarios cost more than others because it takes longer to develop the required mods.
Phil |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 24 Nov 08 3:59 PM
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We have virtually the same setup. We used teams to designate each company and then built security layers for the teams. Now, it's not really security per se, but each team can have their own statuses, types, etc for each contact or account.
Ownership of each contact and account is essantially global - meaning every user has access to every account and contact. However, contact and account responsibility is set by the concept of "Relationship" at the contact level (who is talking to the contact or has in the past) and "Account Coverage" at the Account level.
We have a global script set up to determine a user's security rights based upon their team. This allows us to tag things to their team and reveal certain customizations and functionality.
We're on v6.2.6 (not looking forward to the upgrade) |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 24 Nov 08 4:09 PM
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May I use 'support' by a mean that does not clear to you
What I want as I asked in my previous post is how can Saleslogix manage multi-companies ( i.e. 4 companies each company has its accounts/contacts/opportunities ...etc )
and these 4 companies has one main company that manages them |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 24 Nov 08 4:25 PM
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There is no direct support in SalesLogix for multiple companies, but there are ways of modelling within the product that will probably give you what you want - I am not being evasive.
'Support' means to bear, maintain or sustain - hardly words which will find their ways into a detailed technical spec, because they are ambiguous in this context. I was trying to get you to be specific about your requirements.
For what you want to achieve, as has already been suggested, the use of teams should be employed. Each 'team' will be a company. The 'main' company will be a team which is a member of all the other teams. Accounts which are 'owned' by a team (ie Company) will be accessible only by users in that team and users in the main company.
That takes care of your data security and segregation. But you will still find that all users (regardless of their team/company) see the same screens, share the same picklists etc. If you want to refine this behaviour, you will need to customise the system to get it.
Phil |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 25 Nov 08 6:25 AM
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OK.. to add to what Phil posted....
The "magic" in partitioning data in SalesLogix is a field called "SECCODEID" (ownership field). This field is the core of Out Of The Box Security. On top of this (as Phil pointed out) you use Teams.
There's also a feature called a "Provider Plugin" where it's possible to further restrict access. For example, You could allow team members access to a particular Account but not allow anyone except the Account Manager access to contact(s) under that account.
There's a bunch of possibilities here. I suggest you work w/your BP to design this if you have not done it before. If your BP cannot help you, there are SalesLogix consultants that know how to assist you in this area.
--
RJLedger - www.SlxWizard.com
rjlSystems |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 25 Nov 08 7:33 AM
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The Bottom line answer is YES SalesLogix does support the model of one main account and 4 others associated to it. Each with it's own contacts, opportunities etc.
If you'd like more detail contact me. |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 12 Dec 08 10:05 AM
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| The answer is YES, but how you would go about it depends on the specific requirements. Do all the companies do the same kind of business? Would they use the same customized plugins or do they require separate custom views & features? You could design SLX to look & function differently depending on Team membership, but at a certain point this becomes a development & maintanance nightmare, and you'd be better off having separate SLX DB installations. |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 13 Dec 08 10:22 AM
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Originally posted by Phil Parkin
I agree that there's nothing much (if anything) OOTB to differentiate between users based on their company. In fact, I am going to be writing some mods soon that automatically perform some selection and grouping of an account's History and Attachment items based on the current user's Division (accounts are shared between different divisions of this client, so there is a tendency for clutter in these areas).
But it depends on the requirement to a large extent. If your A/C/O records are shared between entities, your approach is surely fraught with problems? What would you like the system to do?
Phil |
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Been doing this for a decade now for one client....recently ported over to 7.22 from 5.2.6. Basically a picklist on every datagrid form was set to the user's possible companies (some user's could look at more than one company!) and then the SQL for the datagrid filtered out the bad info.....attachments, history, our own activity form, etc. the main screen was generic enough that all companies could use the same form....although some panels were hidden (pre Tab Control which came in v. 6) as needed for a specific company permission. And we wanted the Power/Multiple Company users to be able to choose which company they were filtering by as they went to each TACO record....and remember that they were looking at All Companies, or Company A, or Company A, C, E.....
Also version 6 finally added a CompanyName for the User....something that a developer from WHEATON was screaming for since February 1997.
Works great.
The Wishlist? The archaic/unuseable system of choosing a tombstone/main screen for each user....it's based on PluginID.....so if you redo the Account Detail form, for example, you have to specify the new form for EACH user. This should be by Release, or name of the plugin, possibly tied into the MainView object itself.....tied to a user and allow for copying out to a Dept or Team of users within the Administrator. So you could have a Company A/b/c/d/e/f/g Account Detail.....and develop each seperately.....and when Company B Account Detail was Released to "EVeryone" the only people that would see it would be those designated to see the Company B Account Detail View (based on System:Plugin name, not PluginID.
But multiple companies? very doable......BUT......all of the data is available on the corporate LAN connection.....so setting SECCODEID correctly for subordinate records is very important.
And v. 7.2+ please.
Bottom line here.....SLX needs a way to allow a developer to link a plugin name to each user for the TACO detail views....not the PluginID which is the current system. Company A Account Detail, Company C Account Detail, etc. |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 13 Dec 08 3:07 PM
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We have a number of clients who operate in a multi-company environment. By that I mean the users are divided into more than one legal/operating entity. As noted above, the most common approach is to use Team Ownership based on company to keep Account, Contact, Opportunities, etc. separate. And also noted above, this works very well.
One common problem, however, is that certain users such as marketing personnel, need to see all Accounts for common marketing campaigns. That was solved by making such users members of all Teams. To aid them, I even display specific company logos for each Account based on the parent Team. Unfortunately, this also means that some Customer Accounts are in the database twice, once for each Team. Its possible to use account hierarchy (Parent/Subordinate) approach to help in this situation, but that also could result in additional duplicate type parent accounts.
Another approach which we are considering for one of our clients, is to use a single Account for each Customer, but display Opportunity Product and Sales data in the appropriate tabs based the User's Department. In other words, use the User's Department to distinquish between multiple user companies. That way eliminates duplicate Accounts. It a bit tricky when it comes to Notes/History displays, but it looks like a few simple modifications will help.
One of our clients also needs separate sets of main views for one of its user companies/divisions. Thus, we developed a separate Nav-Bar group to contain different Main Views for Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, etc. for the separate user division. Upon user login, the Global Script is employed to set several global variables which control access to the various set of views for these users. The separate views are only released to the appropriate users based on their Department. That way, other company/divisions can still access the same accounts. This approach seems to work well.
Our biggest problem, however, is integration with the MAS 500 Accounting Package. MAS is capable of multi-company accounting and should be a natural fit for SalesLogix. Unfortunately, we have been forced to use the Dynalink package to integrate SalesLogix and MAS. Dynalink is a batch based application and is NOT designed for multi-company usage. This has forced us to employ the double Accounts method outlined above. It works, but forces us to create all sorts of little criteria tests for various reports.
Sage designed a new integration method commonly called the "ERP Link" to solve the multi-company integration problem. It's also real-time rather than batch, doesn't have to copy accounting data into duplicate tables in SalesLogix, and uses the external connection string approach to directly reading information from the MAS database. It also doesn't work. YET! Sage had to pull this product from the market. But a number of people, including one of our developers, has been helping to correct the code. (Instead of studying the 7.5 Web Client). Sage has taken some of these corrections back and is now preparing a new ERP Link version which, hopefully, will solve the incountered problems. What neat about this new approach is that a single Customer Account in SalesLogix can create separate Sales Orders per each operating Slx user company, push them to MAS in real time, and display product and sales data for each separate multi-company entity in MAS on the same SalesLogix tabs. We all need this now. |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 14 Dec 08 5:17 AM
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Your question can be interpreted 2 ways, and one has been pretty well covered.
The other interpretation:
Any account can designate another account as its PARENT. - there is a link on the Account Screen.
If a parent is defined, there is a button enabled to Show Hierarchy that gives you the ability to see the relationship between companies.
Is that what you were asking?
ws |
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 16 Dec 08 4:55 AM
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Hi Robert - your last para in very interesting. Are you dealing directly with someone at Sage about this revised ERP link? I need to find the best way to establish 2 way integration with Oracle. Oribis task center has been proposed by our Sage BP but currently, i have no other options on the table to consider.
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Re: Multi companies
Posted: 16 Dec 08 8:52 AM
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Sage has a "beta testing" program and we had joined it for the ERP Link. I'm not exactly sure who at Sage can do what regarding this product at this point in time. You might consult with Sage Support to determine if the ERP Link could possibly work with Oracle. Or at least they could directly you to someone in the beta program who works with Oracle.
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