Business Unit Sharing

Business units can share certain customer information through SetIDs. Consequently, you should consider how you are going to set up your customers to optimize processing in your organization. How much do you want to share data among business units? Are the business units separate organizations that need to maintain completely separate customer records, even if they share some of the same customers with other business units in the parent organization?

Does a particular customer exist in more than one business unit under the same customer ID? Do business units share customer information, such as name and address, or does each business unit have its own customer information?

Different organizations answer these questions differently. For example, suppose that organization X has two different business units that do business with Rambling Motors Company. Both business units want to maintain their own customer information on Rambling Motors, so they set up two different customer IDs, both referring to Rambling Motors. In this situation, the two business units would most likely have SetIDs that correspond to the business units, and they would maintain completely separate records.

Other organizations may want to take advantage of the power of SetIDs. For example, suppose that Rambling Motors account 100 does business with all 10 business units of organization Y. Therefore, organization Y may want to set up its customer information only once and share that data among all its business units.