Business Entities

The main business entities a user can belong to in a typical Servitly DPS system are:

• Organization

• Partner

• Customer

Organization

This corresponds to your corporation. It is the main business entity that owns the DPS systems and that is providing the product-service system.

Sub-organization

Recursively, under an organization, you can have sub-organizations.

For example, if your corporation operates in multiple countries, it likely has a central organization based at its headquarters and subsidiary organizations for each country where it does business. These subsidiary organizations may even be further subdivided into regions.

Partner

If you sell your products and services globally, you are likely to rely on external partners to support your operations: distributors, dealers, technical assistance centers (TAC) or others.

A partner is associated with an organization and has visibility on a set of customers.

Sub-partner

Recursively, under a partner, you can have sub-partners.

For example, if you have a distributor in one country, you may have local technical assistance centers as sub-partners.

Customer

Customers are the entities that own or use your products and are the beneficiaries of your product-service system.

If you sell your products to a distributor or reseller you may consider it a customer. While this is correct from a business point of view, it is not correct from the point of view of your DPS.
A distributor must be registered as a partner, and its customers will be registered as customers. In this case we could further specify that these are “end customers”.

Location

A location is a geographical place where the product is installed. A location belongs to only one customer, and a customer can have multiple locations (e.g. Site 1, Site 2).

ACME Example

Below you can find an example of ACME, a fictional company that manufactures and sells its products worldwide.
The main organization has sub-organizations for each region and uses local partners to provide support and maintenance.

Authorizations are interconnection between partners, organizations, and customers/locations.

Authorizations are defined by users having specific permission to do this, and optionally authorizations may have a start or end validity date. For instance, the TAC has visibility on a certain location only if there is a valid maintenance contract between the partner and the customer.

The visibility of products, clients, partners, and sub-organizations depends on the parent entity to which a user belongs, as well as the permissions he or she has been assigned.