For our customers who use the extended customer management (independent “Customer management” module) in ems, the customer hierarchies will now be continuously converted into customer networks. Up to now, all contacts could mainly be maintained and mapped in hierarchies. The existing option of displaying the relationships between individual contacts in the form of networks will be developed further and should replace the conventional hierarchies.
In a hierarchy, a customer can only ever have one superordinate relationship with another customer. In contrast, a network enables the formation of any number of relationships.
In the list of addresses and in the network tree, all contacts have a symbolic representation. The address type is displayed when the cursor is moved to the symbol in the “Code” column.
An arrow in front of the symbol indicates that the contact is subordinate to another.
You can click on any contact in the network tree to open it.
For a new relationship, click on the “magnifying glass” and use the search function to find the contact to be linked. Select the relationship type for the open contact (1) and the contact to be linked (2). At the end, click on “Save”.
To create a new contact that has a relationship with the open contact, click on “New relationship”: a new contact is created.
The type of new relationship can be specified directly when creating a contact. If the relationship type is not selected, the new contact is stored with the relationship “Unknown”. After saving the address, the relationship can be subsequently changed in the “Relationships” tab.
From now on, it will no longer be possible to create new hierarchies. Working with networks will become a mandatory requirement.