Understanding Business Units in PeopleSoft CRM
This topic discusses:
Business unit structure.
Uses of business units in PeopleSoft CRM.
Business Unit Structure
A business unit represents an operational entity for an application. The structure of a business unit depends on the requirements of the PeopleSoft CRM application in which the business unit is defined. For example, you might structure a sales organization (and thus the PeopleSoft Sales CRM business units) on region lines but structure a support organization (and thus the PeopleSoft Support CRM business units) around different product lines.
Using business units enables you to group transactions for reporting purposes. Business units do not have predetermined restrictions or requirements. You can define business units to reflect departmental functionality, along product lines, or by location. An entire organization might have only one business unit if every department uses the same processing rules. Diversified companies, such as those that have multiple cost centers, divisions, or subsidiaries, usually have multiple business units.
PeopleSoft does not deliver predefined business units. You decide how to implement business units in PeopleSoft applications to reflect the structure of the enterprise. Business units are usually specific to individual applications: for example, you set up field service business units for the PeopleSoft Field Service application and Sales business units for the PeopleSoft Sales application. However, some applications can share business units. For example, PeopleSoft Support and PeopleSoft Help Desk are both call center applications and can use the same business unit because the nature of their applications is similar.
You can also relate business units across integrated applications. For example, you can associate call center business units with field service business units for service order integration and with sales business units for sales lead integration.
Warning! After you define a structure, you cannot delete a business unit—you can only inactivate it. Before creating and securing business units, think carefully about how you want to set up the organizational structure and about what information you want groups of users to access.
Uses of Business Units in PeopleSoft CRM
Transactional data in PeopleSoft CRM is associated with business units. For example, leads belong to PeopleSoft Sales business units, and service orders belong to PeopleSoft Field Service business units.
Business units can control the following types of processing:
Business logic.
Some features are enabled and disabled at the business unit level rather than at the application level. For example, PeopleSoft Field Service enables automatic receiving by business unit.
Reporting and analysis.
You can report and summarize information by business unit. For example, several reports that are in PeopleSoft Support and PeopleSoft HelpDesk filter data based on business unit.
Default values.
Values often appear by default for every transaction that is associated with a business unit. For example, the currency value appears by default for each Sales business unit.
Filtering of values for prompt fields.
Prompt fields on PeopleSoft transactions components are often populated differently based on business unit. For example, in PeopleSoft Support you might set up one business unit to handle software issues and another to handle hardware issues. The values that are available to each business unit for the case type and product fields differ depending on whether the business unit that handles the case is set up for software or hardware cases.
Security.
Business units enable you to control row-level security. You can control access to setIDs by user or permission list.
Use of Business Units by CRM Applications
You can use the same business unit across applications. You create the business unit in one application, then use each application's setup component to associate the business unit with each application that uses the business unit.