How You Manage Hierarchies

A hierarchy captures the hierarchical relationships a party, such as a customer, has with other parties. This capability is frequently used to capture your customer's corporate hierarchy and to show how headquarters, branches, subsidiaries, and so on are related.

It can be used to capture the hierarchy of any entity, such as a prospect, supplier, or partner, and not just of customers.

Organizing customer data as hierarchies offers the following advantages:

• Enables you to understand and get a better view of your customer's organization.

• Enables you to better analyze customer-related data.

• Application modules using the hierarchy can use hierarchies to roll up transactions, and apply business rules.

You can leverage the hierarchy of your customers in many business processes. For example, the territory management functionality uses customer hierarchy information to define account dimensions. Financial applications use customer hierarchy information to process payments from one customer and apply them to another customer in the same hierarchy. The revenue roll-up report uses customer hierarchy information to roll up revenue numbers from opportunities across all customers in a hierarchy.

Oracle Cloud Applications have a common framework to manage various hierarchies called the Tree framework. The party hierarchy uses this common framework.

Here are the predefined hierarchy types:

• HZ_CUSTOMER_HIERARCHY: This predefined tree structure is used to maintain a hierarchy among sales prospects, sales accounts, legal entities, and customers.
• HZ_DNB_HIERARCHY: This predefined tree structure is used for maintaining the Dun & Bradstreet corporate hierarchy.
• HZ_PARTY_HIERARCHY: This predefined tree structure is used for maintaining party hierarchies such as the organization and person hierarchies.

You can create or modify hierarchies, using the Manage Hierarchies UI. You can access the Manage Hierarchies UI as follows:

Navigator > Customer Data Management > Hierarchies

Create Hierarchies

To create hierarchies:

1. Navigate to the Manage Hierarchies UI.

2. Click the Create option or button on the Actions menu. The Create Hierarchy: Enter Basic Information page appears.

3. Complete the mandatory fields. You can use the following sample data:

   • Hierarchy Name: Green Corp.

   • Hierarchy Type: Customer Hierarchy

   • Hierarchy Status: Active

   • Effective Start Date: Enter appropriate date and time.

4. Click Next. The Create Hierarchy: Add Parties page appears.

5. Click the Add option or button on the Actions menu. The Add Tree Node pop-up appears.

6. Select one of the following as the Tree Node Type:

   • Specific value

   • Values from referenced hierarchy

7. Click Next. The Create Hierarchy: Review page appears. Verify the hierarchy information and click Back to make any modifications.

8. Click Finish to complete creating the new hierarchy.

Edit Hierarchies

To edit hierarchies:

1. Navigate to the Manage Hierarchies UI.

2. Search and select the hierarchy you want to edit.

3. On the Actions menu, select one of the following options:

   • Edit Hierarchy Version: Lets you make the changes to the hierarchy available immediately.

   • Create New Version: Lets you make the changes to the hierarchy available at a later point in time.

4. Click Add or Remove option or button on the Actions menu as required to update the tree nodes.

5. Click Save and Close to complete editing the hierarchy.