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 provides 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

A partner is a business entity placed between the Organization and Customers. It is associated with an organization and has visibility on a set of customers.
A partner can be one of the following types:

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

• Data Recipient: To be compliant with the EU Data Act, you can use this type of Partners to manage Data Recipients in the DPS.

Sub-partner

Under a partner of type Channel, 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”.

A customer can be one of the following types:

• Business: The customers with a legal entity, for instance, other companies using your product in their business.

• Personal: The consumer customers using your products at their homes.

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 the 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.