Functional unit management overview

In a functional structure, a unit can represent a department, a group, a geographical area or project team, reflecting the common functions delivered within a housing organisation. One of the many benefits of adopting a functional structure is in the ability to inherit the hierarchical properties, such as subject matter expertise, operational skills and a shared focus. Within Civica Cx Housing, the behaviour and purpose of functional units also extends to controlling the amount of data to which an end user can gain access. Through the allocation of one or more functional units, it is possible to dictate access permissions right down to entity level (discrete data items), therefore focusing and channelling an end user's work activities into the areas that are relevant to them. For instance, using targeted entity criteria, rent accounts can be grouped together into custom functional units; hence they can be managed by a different officer or team. Once entity level criteria has been linked to a functional unit, end users operating within that unit will only see parameter list entries, search fields, data components, and the like, that match the restrictions in place. When adding a functional unit to an individual user account, it can be defined as Primary (their core area of responsibility), Secondary (extended areas of responsibility, relevant to providing staff cover or conducting team-wide activities), or Other (encompassing the widest operational functions, reserved for non-sensitive data).

When creating the range of functional units that are applicable to a housing organisation, each record is defined in one of three ways:

Base – These are the ‘building blocks’ and lowest level of functional unit, and can exist independently or be part of a larger functional group.
Group – These combine a collection of individual functional units into one overarching group, preserving the constituent attributes of each. They can consist solely of ‘base’ functional units or comprise other subgroups.
Asset – These are in essence ‘base’ functional units, and their creation provides an efficient way of mirroring the asset hierarchy with an equivalent set of functional unit counterparts. This option is particularly useful in the configuration of service charges.

System preferences are available to define how entities are assigned to functional units, referred to as ‘stamping’ (i.e. the process by which an entity is flagged as belonging to a functional unit):

Include in scheduled stamping – A complete update of all entities linked to each functional unit within a specific company, performed as a scheduled task at an allotted time.
Immediate stamping on creation – An asynchronous process that runs in the background when a new entity is first created, thus ensuring it is instantly linked to all relevant functional units and visible to the end user during their current session.
Immediate stamping on update - An asynchronous process that runs in the background when an existing entity is updated, thus ensuring its links to all relevant functional units are re-established and, again, visible to the end user during their current session.

A new system parameter – Functional Unit Classifications – provides a means of assigning any number of custom labels to individual functional units, and is employed for extended reporting and analysis opportunities. Once created, the link between these classification parameters and functional units can be forged in one of two ways: (1) Functional units can be added individually to a classification, or (2) When creating a new functional unit, existing classifications can be multi-selected for inclusion.

Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of functional unit management, including: