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🎬 [VIDEO] Top 3 Reasons to use Companies

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Employee

We’ve got another Top 3 video with your “On-Demand Workfront CSM”! This time we’re talking about a commonly overlooked (but helpful) object in Workfront – Companies! 

 

Check out the video below. 

 

 

Looking at adding Companies into your mix? Here are some tips! 

Interested in new ideas and approaches? Register for our upcoming workshops our Experience League Events page. We hope to see you soon! 

8 Replies

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Community Advisor

I use companies as clients. I have a different company set up for each product/initiative/MSA-contract, so for us it goes by product or initiative. I attach a form to each "Company" with information about that product/initiative/contract. When a project is opened, the user chooses the product/contract code. Since we are in the pharma/health industry; from that company entry I can prepopulate a lot of the information we need for the project. Example:

Company name is "Humira", from that I know the manufacturer is Abbvie, the therapeutic area is Arthritis/Crohn's/psoriasis, the billing cycle is 60 days, the buyer is Med Affairs, the contact is Jane Doe, the product is pharmaceutical, the product life cycle is post-launch, etc. All this is in calculated fields on the project form that pull from the company form.

This allows the user to not think about filling out a form and concentrate on getting the job done. Plus, it eliminates all the wrong choices you might see in a user-filled form.

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Employee

Oh wow Randy!  I never thought about using the Company custom form to save time (and ensure accuracy) from any user-filled form. I love Companies for so many reasons, but this is a new one to add to my list. Consider my mind-blown!

 

I know you are told every day that you are awesome, but please consider hearing it one more time.  Thank you!

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Level 2

@RandyRoberts   This sounds like the perfect solution to a new Team that I am setting up to manage partner company relationships. I am fairly new to Workfront and having a little trouble wrapping my head around the calculated field part of this. Can you explain the calculations you would have in those fields to pull in the information? I love the idea of prepopulating fields so our customer reps don't have to enter information that already exists.

 

@CynthiaBoon  thank you so much for the video and discussion. I had been brainstorming a way to handle this and your post made it all click.

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Community Advisor

Here's an example where I display the name of the Client Services lead for that client on the Project form, with lot's of screenshots:

First enter a Typeahead field on your Company form that will house the Client Services Lead. I use a dot suffix in the name to identify my Typeahead fields (and I use an underscore for all my calc fields, this makes them easy to identify when they're in a list).

CS Lead Field.jpg

Next is the filter code for the typeahead so it only displays users with the "Client Services" job role. Used the roles:ID for the job role you want to filter for

AND:1:roles:ID=5c9e4f2a00b82d5ae78d319dd7e7de52
AND:1:roles:ID_Mod=in
AND:2:isActive=true
AND:2:isActive_Mod=eq

Then you go through your client list and select the right Client Services person on each client.

Now you add a "Client Services Lead" field of type "Calculated Field" to your Project form.

Proj Form Staff Section.jpg

In the "Calculation" part of the field setup, you enter 

{company}.{DE:YOUR FIELD NAME:name}

with no space before or after the colons. Mine looks like this (note the dot after "Lead"? That's just my naming convention, you don't have to do that)

{company}.{DE:Account Client Services Lead.:name}

The field setup should look something like this

CS Lead Proj Calc Field.jpg

I hope that all makes sense.

You can now add all your staff as well as any other client info you want to pull directly from the client. I have some selectable staff fields as well as the client assigned fields on my project form. A random project in my system looks like this

ScreenShot 2024-10-25 at 5.04.59 PM.jpg

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Level 2

Thank you! That makes complete sense. I am excited to try this out! 

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Community Advisor

I should also add that using a calc field can "bridge the gap" when you want to report on something that's too many hops away.

 

If I want to know a project owner's manager's name on a document report; that's too many hops. But If I put a calc field on the document's project that lists the owner's manager's name, I can read it from there on the document report.

I just made that up off the top of my head but hopefully you get the gist. Maybe someone can give a better example of the same concept.

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Level 2

@RandyRoberts   Is there a way to reference information in more than one company? For example, if I have a project that is assigned to one company, but there is a different company that also has pertinent information, is there a way to use a value stored in a custom field form to reference an associated company?

I can get {company}.{DE:InfoField} to work, but I can't seem to get {DE:ParentCompany:name}.{DE:InfoField} to work.  For reference, ParentCompany is a Company typeahead field. 

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Level 7

Typically, the format is {object}.{field} or simply {field} when referring to the same object. However, the format you're trying to use, {field}.{field}, is not feasible.