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:
- Contacts and Title:
- Company B
- Structure:
- Contacts and Title:
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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