🎬 [VIDEO] Top 3 Reasons to use Companies

[CynthiaBoon]

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! 

• First things first – documentation and tutorials! 
  • Create and edit companies 
  • Create companies – short tutorial video 
  • Create and modify a group’s companies 
• Test in the Sandbox first! See what your vision can look like without impacting your live, production environment. 
  • The Adobe Workfront Preview Sandbox Environment 
• Build a Report or a View that lists the impacted objects you want to move. If it’s Users, then a User View/Report. If it’s Projects, then a Project View/Report. If possible, use Groupings to make it easier to organize the work. 
  • Create a basic view 
• Bulk edit or inline edit to assign your new companies. 
  • Edit Projects in bulk 
  • Edit user profiles in bulk 
• Don’t delete anything – just add and test, add and test, until you’re sure that everything works with the new companies. Then, don’t delete – just deactivate. 
  • Deactivate or reactivate a company 

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

[RandyRoberts]

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.

[CynthiaBoon]

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!

[VynetaRy]

@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.

[RandyRoberts]

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).

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.

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

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

[VynetaRy]

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

[RandyRoberts]

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.

[VynetaRy]

@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. 

[_Manish_Singh]

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.