Organizations

You have the option to track opportunities by organization in Deltek CRM and to associate employees with organizations.

To do that, first set up your organization structure in the General area of the Configuration workspace. Then, each time you add an opportunity on the Opportunity tab, you can associate it with one of your organizations, and each time you set up an employee in the Users area of the Configuration workspace, you associate that person with an organization.

Definition: Organization

An organization is a specific component of your company's operational structure.

Set Up Organizations

You set up your organizations in the General area of the Configuration workspace. If you do not want to track opportunities by organization or assign employees to organizations, do not set up an organization structure.

If you do want to use organizations, setting up the organizations involves the following general steps:

1. Specify the number of levels in your organization structure. You can have from one to five levels in that structure.
2. Give each level a name (for example, Location for the first level and Department for the second).
3. Specify the actual elements for each level. For example, if the first level of the structure is Location, the elements for that level might be Boston, New York, Denver, and Phoenix.
4. 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).

Example: Organizations

A firm with offices in two cities provides architectural, civil engineering, and environmental engineering services. When configuring Deltek CRM, that firm specifies a two-level organization structure, with Location as the top level and Department as the second. The elements at the Location level are Boston and Denver, and those at the Department level are Architecture, Civil Engineering, and Environmental Engineering.

All services are available at all locations, so the firm combines each of the first level elements with each of the second level elements to create the following organizations:

• Boston Arch
• Boston Civil
• Boston Env
• Denver Arch
• Denver Civil
• Denver Env

Use 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 an employee's access either to those opportunities that are assigned to his or her organization only or to opportunities associated with 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 opportunities or employees with that organization.

An organization to which opportunities and active employees are currently assigned can be changed to Inactive, but if it has assigned employees, Deltek CRM 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 opportunities are currently assigned to it, you cannot change it to Dormant if any active employees 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 other records in the database, including opportunities.

Change the Number of Levels in the Organization Structure

Deltek strongly recommends that you carefully plan the organization structure you want before you set it up in Deltek CRM. Once you have set up your organizations and, in particular, once you have assigned opportunities 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 CRM, 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 CRM.

If you add a new level, it is added automatically to all existing organizations as the lowest level of the structure. The value of that level for all organizations is set to <Conversion>. All existing opportunities and employees 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 opportunities to those new organizations, you must display each opportunity and change its assigned organization.

If you reduce the number of levels, Deltek CRM 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 ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE. This might occur, for example, if you try out different organization structures during the implementation of Deltek CRM.

If you set up security roles that base access opportunities based 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 opportunities. To restore their access, use the Security area of the Configuration workspace to select new lists of organizations from the new structure.