Types of Organization Structures

If your firm has an organization structure that you want to implement in Deltek Resource Planning and you have implemented the Resource Planning module, the first step is to select the appropriate organization type: Fixed or Variable.

If you have the CRM module but not the Resource Planning module, your only option, if you want to use organizations, is to select the Fixed organization type and set up a Fixed organization structure in Deltek Resource Planning.

Criteria for Determining Your Organization Type

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.

Example: Fixed Organization Structure

Apple & Bartlett, Inc. has an organization structure with three levels:

• Company: Company 01, Company 02
• Division: Commercial, Governmental
• Department: Engineering, Architecture, Programming, Assembly

To reflect this structure, Apple & Bartlett's organization IDs have three segments corresponding to the three levels. Those segments contain the following numbers of characters:

• Company: 2 characters (IDs for the two companies: 01, 02)
• Division: 2 characters (IDs for the two divisions: 10, 20)
• Department: 4 characters (IDs for the 4 departments: 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000)

Each full organization ID, then, has three segments, and each ID in a segment has the standard number of characters specified for that segment. The following are some examples:

• 01.10.2000 (Company 01, Commercial, Architecture)
• 01.20.2000 (Company 01, Governmental, Architecture)
• 02.20.4000 (Company 02, Governmental, Assembly)

This organization structure is a Fixed structure for the following reasons:

• All organizations have the same number of levels: three.
• Each level has a standard set of IDs and names that are used across the structure. For example, if both Company 01 and Company 02 provide engineering services, the organizations that provide those services have 1000 as the ID for the third level (Department) and Engineering as the name.
• The organization structure has no more than five levels (three in this case).
• The organization IDs have no more than 14 characters, including level delimiters (10 in this example: 8 alphanumeric characters and 2 periods as delimiters).

Examples: Variable Organization Structure

If any one of the conditions illustrated by the examples below is true for your organization structure, the structure is Variable. (Company is the top-level of the organization structure in all of the examples.)

• Not all parts of the structure have the same number of levels.

  Example: Organizations with Company 01 as the top level have four levels (Company, Division, Department, and Discipline), and those under Company 02 have only three levels (Company, Division, and Department):

  01.20.1000.10

  02.10.1000

• Not all parts of the structure have the same levels.

  Example: Organizations under Company 03 and under Company 04 all have two levels, but the second level under Company 03 in the structure is Division, while the second level under Company 04 is Department:

  03.2000 - Company 03 Governmental Division

  04.1000 - Company 04 Engineering Department

• Within each level, some IDs and names vary across branches of the organization structure.

  Example: Under Company 05 in the structure, 1000 in the Department segment of the organization ID indicates Engineering, while under Company 06, 1000 in that segment indicates Architecture:

  05.1000 - Company 05 Engineering

  06.1000 - Company 06 Architecture

• The size of the organization ID segment for a level differs across branches of the organization structure.

  Example: Under Company 07 in the structure, the Department segment of the organization ID contains 4 characters, while under Company 08, it only contains 2 characters:

  07.1000 - Company 07 Engineering Department

  08.20 - Company 08 Architecture Department

• The organization structure has more than five levels or the organization IDs have more than 14 characters, including level delimiters. Organization IDs in a Variable structure can have up to 30 characters, including level delimiters, and up to 15 levels.

  Example: 2.1.33.500.01.200 (6 levels and 17 characters (12 alphanumeric characters and 5 delimiter characters)).