Company sets and vendors shared between organizations
The Company Master application, in which you maintain a master list of vendors, stores data in the company set. The vendors that you do business with are unique within the company set. One or more organizations can share the same company set.
Using company sets provides the following benefits:
- You can standardize your list of approved vendors.
- You can create global contracts that can be shared by multiple organizations.
The relationship between the Company Master application and the Companies applications is like the relationship between the Item Master application and the Inventory application. In the Company Master application, you create a catalog of companies and you associate individual companies with specific organizations. In the Companies application, which stores data at the organization level, users can access the vendor information associated with their organization.
The companies records and company master records have many fields in common. A user can edit these fields in the Companies application without changing the values in the Company Master application. For example, while the Ship Via field in the Company Master record might be one shipping vendor, one of the organizations using that company set might want to specify a different vendor.
When you create a company set in the Sets application, you have the option of automatically adding the companies to the Company Master application. By default, this option is not enabled, which means that users must manually enter new companies in the Company Master application. However, you can enable the options so that the record is automatically added in the Company Master application.
You apply a company set to one or more organizations. If an organization requires its own list of vendors and contracts, you can create a separate company set for it.
The following figure illustrates an example of an enterprise with three organizations and eight sites. Two organizations, and their five sites, share the same company set. The third organization has its own company set.
Item sets and company sets are independent of each other. The following figure illustrates such an example. There are four organizations and eight sites. Organizations 1 and 2 share Item Set 1; Organizations 3 and 4 share Item Set 2. Organizations 1 and 2 each have their own company set. Organizations 3 and 4 share Company Set 3.