Forum Discussion

IvanWeiss's avatar
IvanWeiss
Qrew Captain
6 years ago

Re: Recommendation on best way to create hierarchy between client contacts

Evan, thanks for the SUPER DETAILED response again!  So here is my challenge....  I have several different clients I need to maintain the relationship for.  Not all of them have the same structure level.

So my concern with the separate table is one of my client uses RVP and DM as the levels.  Another one of my clients use SVP, Vice President of Operations, and DM as the three levels (they have an extra one).

So in a separate table approach could it intelligently understand this or does that push me to the self related table approach?

If I go with the self table relationship....  I think I would relate "down" stream correct?  So on the contact I would have a one to many relationship to contacts and that relationship would be direct reports and that would be the level down (DM's in the first example above)

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Ivan Weiss
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1 Reply

  • EvanWestbrook's avatar
    EvanWestbrook
    Qrew Cadet
    6 years ago
    Ivan,

    I'm glad you appreciated the details. I get a little excited about data stuff sometimes.

    To answer your question: yes, the separate table approach would handle varying structure levels for different companies.

    If we think about this on a really high abstraction level, this use case is just describing how entities are related to other entities (sounds like a database!) With corporate management structures, we're tracking how employees are related to other employees. Specifically, who reports to whom. Since this doesn't require an employee's title (at least in the eyes of the database,) we can handle the corporate structures of different organizations in the same table. Said another way, the corporate hierarchy of Company A and B are implicit in the "Contact Hierarchy" table.

    Here's a quick example:
    • Company A:
      • Structure:
        • RVPs report to VPs
      • Contacts and Title:
        • Diane (VP)
        • Todd (RVP)
    • Company B
      • Structure:
        • DMs report to VPs
      • Contacts and Title:
        • Caroline (VP)
        • Bo (DM)
    In the "Contacts Hierarchy" table, we would enter the following (and maybe even pull [Title] and [Company] over as a Lookup Fields for reporting purposes.)
    • Record 1
      • Supervisor: Diane
      • Direct Report: Todd
    • Record 2
      • Supervisor: Caroline
      • Direct Report: Bo
    Without explicitly defining it for Company A or B in the database, we still know the corporate management hierarchies of each company. If Todd reports to Diane, Todd is a RVP,  Diane is a VP, and both of them work for Company A, we can assume that the corporate management structure at Company A is "RVP reports to VP."  This is also handy if you encounter a company with different management structures by department. For example, your Sales department at Company A might be Associate to DM to RVP to VP, but the Finance department might be Analyst to VP.

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    Evan Westbrook
    PRIME Developer
    Harder Mechanical Contractors Inc.
    Portland OR
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