Foundation objects

Foundation refers to the common set of forms and data that support the entire BMC Remedy ITSM Suite of applications.

Company

Company is a primary data structure in the foundation. This structure has two main purposes: tenancy definition and external company definition.

Tenancy refers to how data and rules are partitioned within the BMC Remedy IT Service Management (BMC Remedy ITSM) applications. For example, a company might have two business units that use the BMC Service Desk: Incident Management application. Each business unit has its own definitions of data, categorizations, assignment rules, and approval rules to make sure that this data is not intermixed.

Tenancy enables you to define the partitions between the two business units and enforce the data level permissions for access. In this example, a company would be defined for each business unit to define partitioning of rules and data.

A primary function of the company data structure in the foundation is to define tenants that use BMC Remedy ITSM applications. This function of company defines both how the application will partition the data and the rules for the application, based on different distinct users of the application.

Business units are one example of partitioning. If you need to partition the data and the rules of the applications, based on individual business units, then you need to define different companies for each business unit.

You can also use the company definition to define other types of companies that are used in the application, such as manufacturers, suppliers, and so on.

Company types

BMC Remedy ITSM supports the following company types:

Company type	Description
Customer	An external company for which you provide services
Generic contact	A company that you want to reference on the People form. A generic contact is used to track information about people for informational purposes. You cannot select a generic contact from within the BMC Remedy ITSM applications.
Operating company	An internal company or business unit for which you provide services. In a Hub and Spoke environment, companies that are resident on a spoke server and receive IT Management support from a Service Provider on the hub server must be defined as an Operating company.
Service Provider company	A company that is contracted to provide IT management services to Operating companies. In a Hub and Spoke environment, a Service Provider company resides on the hub server and provides IT management services to the Operating companies on the spoke servers.
Supplier company	A third-party supplier of products
Manufacturer	A company that manufactures a product identified in the Product Catalog
Vendor	A third-party vendor that provides services for you

Note

People cannot be associated to a Manufacturer type of company.

You can associate support groups (and relate people to those support groups) only for the following company types:

Customer
Operating company
Service Provider company
Vendor

Only users who are members of support groups can access core BMC Remedy ITSM forms, such as the Incident, Change, Problem, and Asset forms. Even for users who are members of a support group, there are certain exceptions based on the company type. For example, a user who is a member of a vendor company cannot create a change or release, but can be assigned to work on the change either as a change or release coordinator or as a change or release manager.

Customers who request support must belong to either a customer company or an operating company.

Companies can be more than one type. After the company has been created, you can add an additional company type by opening the Company form and selecting the additional company type. When you save your changes, the additional company type is appended to the existing company type.

Company types example

Calbro Services has an IT department that provides support for all employees of both Calbro Services and Company A. Calbro Services is the operating company, because some of the employees of Calbro Services are support staff.

Because Company A receives support from the IT department, Company A is customer type of company.

A manufacturer company is specified in the Product Catalog and is a company that manufactures software that is used by Calbro Services. For example, if Calbro Services uses Microsoft Word, Microsoft is the manufacturer.

A company that supplies this product to Calbro Services is a supplier company. A company that supplies Microsoft Word licenses to Calbro Services is a supplier.

Both the manufacturer and supplier companies are external entities. They do not have access to the BMC Remedy ITSM applications being used by Calbro Services. The distinction between manufacturer and supplier is crucial for the Software License Management feature provided by BMC Remedy Asset Management.

If Company A requires support for a service that Calbro Services obtains from Company C, then Company C is a vendor type of company. Users in support groups for a vendor company can have access to BMC Remedy Service Desk to report incidents and problems.

Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy defines who has access to what data on a row-level basis. For example, in a service provider environment a single application might be used by multiple companies, with the data for each company hidden from other companies using that application.

To provide a user with access to data for multiple companies, add more companies to the Access Restrictions list. If a user needs to access data for all companies, you can set the user's access to Unrestricted. After field 112 and field 60900 are populated, any query to BMC Remedy AR System shows only rows of data that a user has permission to see, based on their own permissions and the permissions in field 112 and field 60900.

In BMC Remedy IT Service Management (BMC Remedy ITSM), multi-tenancy is defined using companies. Companies are defined as operating companies and vendor companies, and users are associated with these companies to define their access rights. A user is associated with a company through the People form.

Implementation of multi-tenancy

The services provided by the BMC Remedy Action Request System (BMC Remedy AR System) platform are primary to the implementation of multi-tenancy. BMC Remedy AR System enables you to control access to data based on permission groups, and to determine if those permission groups have access to individual rows of data.

BMC Remedy IT Service Management (BMC Remedy ITSM) writes company IDs to a special field (field 112). Each data record contains this field, which is normally hidden. For example, when you select the contact and classification companies on the Incident form, workflow updates field 112 values with the company IDs of the customer company and contact company. For child records, such as the tasks or costs associated with an incident, the tenancy information is passed down from the parent.

While field 112 is populated based on the customer and contact companies of a record, field 60900 is populated based on the support company. The support company is the company of the staff assigned to a ticket, based on the three-tier support group data structure (Support Company, Support Organization, and Support Group). Field 60900 is populated on application forms based on the company that is assigned to that record. For example, on the Incident form, when you assign the incident to a support group, workflow updates field 60900 values with the group ID of the assigned support company. For child records, such as the tasks or costs associated with an incident, field 60900 is passed down from the parent.

For more information about multi-tenancy, see Configuring multi-tenancy and Multi-tenancy and Data Management.

People

The People structure within the BMC Remedy IT Service Management (BMC Remedy ITSM) applications includes forms that are primarily accessed through the People form.

The main form (or parent form), People, is used to store an individual's contact information, their organization, and location structures information.

For more information, see People information.

Organization

The organizational structure describes the organizations and departments within a company.

Support groups

Support groups are used to define groupings of support staff, based on their skills. Service management requests such as incidents, problems, and change requests are assigned to a support group and, during the life of the request, are sometimes referred from one support group to another.

The support structure can differ from the organization structure.
A support staff member can belong to many support groups.
Vendor support groups can be defined to support external assignment of requests.
The Support Group role must be specified for information only; there is no associated workflow.