Designing Your Own Managers

You can create your own managers for Unifier. You can create up to 25 managers.

Managers are a means to create, consolidate, and monitor such things as schedule activities, resource allocations, or project/shell/company costs. Managers generally use a discrete set of functions to control and provide oversight for specific purposes, such as document maintenance or scheduling. Most managers work as nodes in the Unifier navigator where users can create both the items to manage, and an electronic "sheet" where these items can be consolidated and monitored.

You can create your own managers to consolidate and monitor any entities you want. You can create your own code system and navigation for the manager, and design your own data elements for the business processes the manager will use. After you have created a manager, you can deploy it at the company or project/shell level.

In most managers, you can roll up currency amounts from BP records to a sheet, or from one sheet to another. However, in configurable managers, you can roll up not only currency amounts, but also quantity amounts. To use this feature, you will need to create specific data elements to place on the manager attribute (detail) form. These fields must be built on the following data definitions and will serve as "containers" for collecting the values from business process line items:

Using these data definitions for the fields on your attribute form, you can separately roll up currency, decimal, and integer amounts from BP line items to the manager sheet. (For information on how to create data elements, see Creating a Data Structure.)

Using the snapshot feature, users can take a "picture" of the manager sheet at any point in time. This can be useful to expose specific items for particular attention.

You can design two kinds of managers: Code and Records-based and Code-based.

From a Code and Records-based manager, you can drill down from the sheet to individual items but from a Code-based manager you cannot drill down from the sheet to individual items.

Code and Records-based

In Unifier, a Code and Records-based manager is where users can enter items and classify them into categories to make managing them more efficient. You can create categories (called classes) of items in uDesigner, and users can add records of individual items to these classes and manage them on electronic sheets. After the Unifier user creates an item under a class, it automatically appears on the sheet.

In Unifier, the [manager] node lists the names of every item class that was created. These nodes are where users can add items to the class, or modify them. The manager node supports multiple levels of data (such as an equipment class and equipment items) with drill-down capability.

In the Sheets node, users can create a new sheet (one per code class) and specify what should appear on the sheet for the class, create formulas for sheet calculations, and roll up currency and quantity values from BPs to the sheet. After the sheet is created, Unifier will automatically add a row to the sheet whenever a new item is added to any class. The application will also automatically refresh the sheet whenever an item is modified.

From the sheet, users can import and export column data in CSV format to and from other applications.

An example of a Code and Records-based manager might be an inventory or parts manager to itemize and keep track of parts for your facilities. In this manager, you could:

In This Section

Across-Shell Functioning

Design Requirements for a Code-Based Manager

Design Requirements for a Code and Records-based Manager

Testing and Publishing a Manager


Last Published Monday, June 3, 2024