Company Functions Overview
A function is a label that helps identify the type of specialist within your company who should own a deliverable, activity, workflow action, or gatekeeper position in a project. Within process models, Process Designers can select a function to identify the default functional owner of deliverables, activities, workflow actions, or gatekeeper positions that make up the model. When defining a project team within a project, the Project Manager or a Process Manager can select which user assigned to the function is a member of the project. That user is automatically assigned to all the documents that have that function assigned in the project, streamlining the assignment creation process.
Functional areas serve as categories to sort functions into logical groups and typically reflect departments within your company: Engineering, Marketing, Manufacturing, and so on. Functional areas can be as large or as granular as what fits your company's needs. Functions typically reflect job titles or positions that fall within a functional area. For example, a functional area of Engineering could have functions defined for Electrical Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, and Chemical Engineer.
Note: Although functional areas and functions typically reflect departments and job titles or positions within your company, you can use them to identify users in other classifications.
Example
Company A has a functional area defined for Operations, which includes members of its purchasing department. Within the Operations functional area, there is a function defined called Purchasing Leader.
Company A requires Purchasing Leaders to gather Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) from parts vendors during the first phase of any project that requires manufacturing. A Process Designer defines a process model to use for manufacturing projects that contains a deliverable in the first stage called Vendor-NDA. The Vendor-NDA deliverable indicates the Purchasing Leader as the function assigned.
Within a project based on the process model, the Process Manager or Project Manager assigned to the project can select the employee assigned to the Purchasing Leader function to add to the project team. Within the deliverable assignments for the Vendor-NDAs with the project, the user list now includes the team member selected for the Purchasing Leader function as owner of that deliverable.
See the following to get started: