BUSINESS ASSOCIATES
Contents |
Introduction
PPDM Version 3.7 Business Associates is a support module designed to capture information about Business Associates to be captured and made available for sharing among applications, departments and organizations. A Business Associate may be an individual, company, consortium, or jurisdictional body such as a regulatory or government agency.
Business Associates may have provided services to you or be key contacts at another organization you are doing business with. Business Associates may have been involved in your legal disputes in some capacity, such as land right contests. The Business Associates support module may be used simply to provide a directory of companies, people, consortiums, and agencies that provide specific services in your area or to describe the organizational structure at your company.
The Business Associates module is a critical component of every other business and support module in PPDM 3.7; integrating the richness of information that can be stored for your business associates adds value to every aspect of your business. The Business Associates module can be used separately or as a support module for the other business modules within PPDM Version 3.7 where this information needs to be captured.
Business Process Overview
Purpose
Business Associates are involved in every business process and transaction. Detailed descriptive meta data about who you are doing business with adds value to the information you keep. Properly managing business associate information also can help you ensure that your legal obligations are properly tracked and managed.
Description
Detailed information about business associates can be tracked in the business associates module including:
- Names, including naming history, acquisitions and mergers
- Current and historical addresses and contact information
- Employee (consultant etc) / employer relationships
- Organizational structures
- Levels of authority, including spending limits and authority over specific business objects
- Services provided for wells, seismic, obligations, land rights, contracts and more
- Permits and licenses to conduct operations, from drivers licenses to permits to handle explosives
- User preferences such as meeting times and locations or technical preferences for well log access
Key Business Processes
Historical Tracking and Version Control
Business requirements demand that effective systems be able to manage information about business associates as they are structured in the current environment, but that historical information also be available on an as needed basis. This requirement is often driven by legal or regulatory requirements, and care must be taken to ensure that important information is not lost over time.
For example, mergers and buy-outs may not result in the transfer of legal responsibility and liability for wells, facilities or seismic surveys away from the original owner; often the original owner will continue to exist as a legal entity for the purpose of carrying this liability in the long term. In these cases, overwriting an old company name with a new company name may have significant consequences.
Certain Business Associates’ information may change from time to time, such as their roles, contact information, addresses, the services they provide, etc. Changes in the corporate environment, such as mergers, buy-outs, personnel changes, or the formation of consortiums may also occur.
Proper historical maintenance of Business Associates will ensure that you can associate your business objects with the corporate environment as it is today, or as it was a decade ago. Understanding these and other business realities is critical to properly managing business associates over time.
Sharing Information
Unlike many types of core data, Business Associate information is often managed independently by many groups and organizations within a company. Industry wide, there are thousands of separate, unconnected Business Associate databases in existence today. Managing and sharing this information in a meaningful way is a complex, time consuming process. Whenever possible, it is desirable to create a centralized repository of business associate information that can be distributed to various organizations and software applications as needed through database links or XML. Both can be supported with PPDM 3.7.
