13 - Managing Associations and Commenting

In this tutorial we will revisit editing objects to show you how to manage associations and how to create comments. From the home page or search results, open the Decision “Select Marketing Offer.” As we noted before, the Decision editing page, like all object editing pages, has two columns:

• A Jump to list
• The properties and associations that can be edited

To edit an object you can scroll up and down the central column to see all the available properties and associations or you can use the Jump menu to quickly access specific property and association sets. To manage associations must navigate to them in the edit panel. For instance, to edit the organizational context of this Decision, click on the Organizations jump menu. This will jump the central column to display the Organizations section with its three associations – Owned by, Made by and Impacts.

The associations a Decision has to Organizations are typical of associations managed in DecisionsFirst Modeler. To add new objects to an association you simply type the key word at the text box to find the object you wish to associate and select it into the list. The search here works similarly to the main search in that it is not case sensitive, matches to descriptions not just names, uses tags and supports partial words in the search. You can also choose to display the results in different ways.

This particular Decision is clearly “owned” by the Marketing department – they define how this Decision should be made. Select the Marketing organization from the search results and drag it to the Owned by list to associate it. Given the plans by BigCo to make cross sell offers in support conversations as well as sales situations we need to associate both the Sales and Support organizations with this Decision by dragging them to the Made by list. Finally, given that successful cross-sell campaigns will result in additional sales and larger orders, the Shipping organization should be added to the Impacts list as they will be impacted by the Decision.

A similar process can and should be followed to add the Objective Improve Customer Profitability to the Objective list.

One final editing note. If you want to comment on an object but not change its properties - perhaps you are not sure what change to make or want to check with someone first but don't want to lose the thought - you can create a comment. Click on the Comment jump menu and you will go to the bottom of the edit panel. Here you can see any comments posted previously, in date order, and can enter a new one. Simply type your comment in the box and hit submit.

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