Organizations
You have the option to associate employees, generic resource, projects, and opportunities with organizations. To configure Deltek Resource Planning to use organizations, you first use the Organization Structure Setup dialog box to select the type of structure and other properties of the structure, and then you either enter or import information that defines your individual organizations.
If you configure Deltek Resource Planning to use organizations, you can, for example, search for employees based on their home organization in the Resource Planning workspace, or track opportunities by organization in the Business Development workspace.
Definition: Organization
An organization is a specific component of your company's operational structure.
Organization Structure Types
- If all of the following are true for your organization structure, you have a fixed structure:
- Your organization structure has a standard number of levels.
- Within each level, each ID and name means the same thing across all branches of the organization structure.
- You have no more than 5 levels.
- You have no more than 14 characters in your organization IDs, including level delimiters.
- If one or more of the requirements listed above are not true for your organization structure, you have a variable structure. A variable structure has few requirements. For example, different branches of the hierarchy can have different numbers of levels, and the number of characters allotted to a given level in organization IDs can vary.
Note that if you select an organization structure type and enter or import organizations, you cannot then change the organization structure type unless you first delete all of the organizations.
Set Up Organizations with a Fixed Structure
- Specify the number of levels. The maximum is five.
- Specify the number of characters in each level's segment of the organization IDs. The total number of characters, including delimiters, for all levels cannot exceed 14.
- Enter the actual element IDs and names for each level. For example, if the first level of the structure is Location, the elements for that level might be 01 (Boston), 02 (New York), 03 (Denver), and 04 (Phoenix).
- If your organization structure has more than one level, define each of the organizations by combining one element from each of the levels (Boston Architecture, Boston Engineering, New York Architecture, New York Engineering, and so on).
Set Up Organizations with a Variable Structure
To set up organizations if you have a variable structure, you specify the delimiter character that separates the level segments in your organization IDs in the Organization Structure Setup dialog box, if you have more than one level, and you then you either import all of the organization IDs and names from a .CSV file or import them using an API. Organization IDs in a variable structure can have up to 30 characters, including delimiters. The structure can have up to 10 levels.
When you import the organization IDs, Deltek Resource Planning uses the delimiters in the IDs to determine the organization structure hierarchy.
Use Organizations
- Assign every employee to an organization when you enter employees in on the Employees & Users area of the Configuration workspace or when you import employees into Deltek Resource Planning.
- Assign every project to an organization when you import projects into Deltek Resource Planning.
You also have the option to assign or not assign individual generic resources and opportunities to organizations.
If you implement organizations, you have the option to assign each opportunity to an organization, but that is not required. Employees, however, must be assigned to an organization if you set up organizations.
If you use organizations, you can set up security roles that restrict a user's access to project plans and opportunities either to those projects or opportunities that are assigned to his or her organization only or to projects or opportunities assigned to one of a selected group of organizations.
Change the Status of an Organization
In the General area of the Configuration workspace, you can change the status of an organization, though restrictions may apply.
If you change the status of an organization from Active to Inactive or Dormant, the organization no longer appears in lookup lists, and you can no longer associate projects, opportunities, employees, or generic resources with that organization.
An organization to which active records are currently assigned can be changed to Inactive, but if it has assigned employees or projects, Deltek Resource Planning displays a message asking you to confirm that you want to inactivate it.
The Dormant status is intended only for organizations that you are in the process of phasing out. Though you can change an organization to Dormant if existing records are currently assigned to it, you cannot change it to Dormant if any active employees or projects are still assigned to it.
Delete an Organization
You can delete an organization in the General area of the Configuration workspace but only if it is not associated with any employees, projects, opportunities, or generic resources in the database.
Change the Number of Levels in a Fixed Organization Structure
Deltek strongly recommends that you carefully plan the organization structure you want before you set it up in Deltek Resource Planning. Once you have set up your organizations and, in particular, once you have assigned employees, projects, opportunities, and generic resources to those organizations, it is difficult and time consuming to change the number of levels.
Important: Changing the organization structure affects many areas of Deltek Resource Planning, and it can take some time for the update process to finish. If you decide to change the number of levels, Deltek strongly recommends that you do so when no one else is using Deltek Resource Planning.
If you add a new level, it is added automatically to all existing organizations as the lowest level of the structure. The element value at that level for all organizations is set to <Conversion>. All existing employees, projects, opportunities, and generic resources that previously were assigned to organizations are assigned to organizations with <Conversion> at the lowest level. At that point, you can add other more meaningful values for the new level and create new organizations that use those values. However, if you want to assign existing records to those new organizations, you must change their assigned organizations individually. For employees and opportunities, you can do that in Deltek Resource Planning or you can import them again with the import option to update existing records selected; for projects or generic resources, you can only update the assigned organization by importing them again with the import option to update existing records selected.
If you reduce the number of levels, Deltek Resource Planning removes the lowest level. If that results in duplicate organizations, all but one of those organizations are removed, and all records associated with those duplicate organizations are assigned to the one remaining organization.
If you set up organizations and later want to remove the organization structure altogether, select None in TYPE in the Organization Structure Setup dialog box. This might occur, for example, if you try out different organization structures during the implementation of Deltek Resource Planning.
If you set up security roles that base access to project plans and opportunities on custom lists of organizations, the organizations referenced in those lists are not updated for the changes that occur when you change the number of levels. As a result, employees assigned those security roles will no longer have access to plans and opportunities. To restore their access, use the Security area of the Configuration workspace to select new lists of organizations from the new structure.
Change the Number of Characters for a Level
You can increase the number of characters allotted to the element IDs for a level in the organization IDs after you have set up organizations. If you do, Deltek Resource Planning adds zeros to the left of the current IDs for the level.
You cannot reduce the number of characters allotted to a level.