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Trees depict hierarchical structures that represent a group of summarization rules for a particular database field. For example, a tree can specify how your manufacturing locations should be summarized, or rolled up, for reporting purposes.

Or a tree can show the reporting relationships within an organization by specifying how the individual department should be summarized into territories, territories into regions, and regions into countries. Similarly, a tree can categorize items in a catalog.

The summarization rules depicted in a tree apply to the detail values of a particular field: vendors, departments, customers, or other values that you define. These detail values are summarized into nodes on the tree. The nodes may also be organized into levels to logically group nodes that represent the same type of information or level of summarization.

For example, the values of the DEPTID field identify individual departments in your organization. You use PeopleSoft Tree Manager to define the organizational hierarchy that specifies how each department relates to the others—departments 10700 and 10800 report to the same manager, department 20200 is part of a different division, and so on. In other words, you build a tree that mirrors the existing organizational hierarchy.

Your chart of accounts is another prime candidate for trees. You can create trees that specify how you want to roll up accounts into summary ledgers or reports. You can create multiple trees, providing different roll-ups for different views of your account data.

Once you have defined an organizational tree, the system can use it in a variety of ways. For example:

Reporting.

When you want a report that summarizes results for a particular division or region, the system can check against the tree to determine which departments to include. Without the tree, you’d have to explicitly specify the departments you wanted every time you created a report.

Summary ledgers.

To create a summary ledger that summarizes account balances by department, the system refers to the tree to determine the DEPTID values to include in the summarized ledger entries. (Summary ledgers are only used in PeopleSoft Financials applications.)
 

Security.

You can restrict user access to their divisions. The application tables tell the system what department the user is in; the tree tells it what other departments are in the same division. (This use is appropriate for PeopleSoft Human Resources applications only.)

Additionally, you can create different organizational trees for different purposes. Suppose you want to group departments together differently for reporting and for security. Maybe you want to include data from regional offices in your summary reports, but you do not want to give corporate users access to regional employee records. In this case, you’d create two trees—a “departmental” tree that groups departments by function, regardless of region, and a “regional” tree that groups departments by location. Then you’d use one for reporting and the other for security.
 

Advantages of PeopleSoft Trees

By building trees, you give the system a single place to look for summarization rules. This centralization enables you to define rules once and then use them throughout the system. For example, different reports, ledgers, and security profiles might refer to parts of your company’s organizational chart. All these objects can refer to the same predefined tree.

Trees make it easier to select and update values in reports, ledgers, or security profiles. Rather than specify departments 8202, 8203, 8513, 8515, and 8663 in a report, you can specify the Lafayette branch, which includes all these departments according to the tree. When the organizational structure changes, you update the tree once rather than updating an untold number of reports, ledgers, security profiles, and so on.

Another advantage of trees is that they present summarization rules visually. Looking at a tree through PeopleSoft Tree Manager, you can easily see how the values relate to each other.