Organization Units (Org Units) are very similar to Departments within an Organization and they can be hierarchical. So they can be setup to mirror your organization's structure.
The assigned Org Unit does not impact how spend is classified within the Community's ERP. Spend within the ERP is solely based on the GL Accounting information on purchase order lines, rather than the organization unit.
Other Usage of Organization Units
- View Orders Sharing (optional) - Sharing is a feature in Unimarket that allows users to access orders within the same Organization Unit. This feature provide departments visibility of orders for their group, as well as spend data within the group. With a hierarchical structure, the department heads can easily see all orders from the Org Units they manage.
- Receiving Sharing (optional) - Receiving Sharing allows members of the Org Unit to receive any order for their department. With this option disabled, only the Buyer or Browser can perform the receiving action on the order.
- Procurement Dashboard - Users will have access to Reports within the Procurement Dashboard. The user can view the spend data of the assigned Org Unit(s). If a user chooses a parent Org Unit, the child Org Units will be included in the data.
- Reporting - Users can export orders for their Org Units; individually or for all Org Units they belong to.
- Shopping Lists - This feature provides the user with the ability to create a shopping list with commonly ordered items from Hosted Catalog, Roundtrip, and/or Non-Catalog Items. The user can also share selected lists with other users within their Organization Unit.
- User Management: All users should be assigned one or more organization units, within the user's Unimarket profile. To ensure, the user's spend is designated to the correct org unit. Only Org Units that have a parent can have users added to them. To ensure top tier Org Units cannot be accessed by users. Administrators can easily filter by user Org Unit in the Manage User screen.
- Account Code Restriction - In many cases, a community will want to limit the GL accounting codes users can view when checking out a requisition. Once this feature is activated for the community, Administrators may select specific codes or a range of codes, the members of each Org Unit are able to access. Administrators can limit the visibility of codes available to only some departments.
- Approvals by Org Unit (not recommended) – Approvals will be routed based on the buyer's Org Unit for requisitions, invoices and/or expenses. If the buyer belongs to multiple Org Units, they will select the appropriate one during the checkout process. Each buyer is tied to an Organization or Org Unit. And the specified Org Unit is tied to one or more approval chains, containing a hierarchy of approvers with delegated approval level. If there is more than one approval chain, the buyer can select the correct one when creating the requisition
- Contracts – When creating a Contract, you can assign the “owning” Org Unit which gives all users in that Org Unit, visibility of the Contract without being a contract member. You can also limit who can purchase against the contract with the Purchasing Org Units. So, only the users in a selected Purchasing Org Unit can select the contract on the checkout screen. Linking the order to the contract for spend tracking. If your contract is assigned to an Org Unit, you can filter the contracts by the Org Units on the View Contracts screen.