Establishing An Organizational Structure

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A well-organized online business structure should reflect the business's existing operational structure. This includes the chain of command, territorial or product divisions, and internal teams. Creating such a structure early in your use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM pays off when you need to make changes in response to organizational growth and product diversification.

When you start to plan your organization's hierarchy, refer to a current organization chart if one exists. If one does not, it is worth taking the time to rough out your organization's hierarchical structure on paper before you start this process in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

After this corporate structure is set, the management team and their designates can add their own business units (for example, locations, divisions, or departments) to the organization hierarchy, and determine how territories, products, and employee responsibilities are handled.

Business Units

The Business Unit is the basic underlying component of an organization.

Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, you can have as many as three types of business units:

  • The root business unit is the top-level business unit in your organizational chart. The root is created based on the organization name that you enter during the installation, from your license key. You cannot change or delete this information.
  • A parent business unit is a business unit that has one or more child business units.
  • A child business unit is subordinate to a parent business unit.

Working with Business Units

You can view the existing corporate structure in a list view to see all the parent and child business units of the organization. In the default view the child business units have their parent units listed. From the default view you can modify the organizational structure by adding or disabling business units, by editing the information about a business unit, or by assigning a different parent business unit to a child business unit. You can also remove or add child business units to an existing parent business unit. This makes it easier for you to update the organization's organizational structure in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

You can disable a business unit if you want to leave its structure in the database, even though the business unit itself has temporarily or permanently ceased to exist. For historical record-keeping it might be required that you retain information about canceled business units, or it might become necessary to reactivate the unit in a future reorganization. When you disable a business unit, users assigned to the business unit cannot to log on to the system or access their data.

You can reorganize or restructure your organization by opening business unit records and reassigning them from one parent business unit to another, or from the organization to an underlying business unit. When you reassign a business unit, all its child business units move with it by default.