Hierarchies Design

Question:
What is a Hierarchy, and why should I use it?

Hierarchies are designed for organizations with 100+ vehicles. Hierarchies allow you to organize your fleet using multiple branches based on function, organizational structure, geographic region, or other customer-defined methods.

Giving Hierarchy Admin Access

Specific to hierarchies, the Hierarchy Admin permission enables other users to create new hierarchies or edit individual hierarchies to which they’ve been given access via User Admin. Implementing a hierarchy structure with multiple department managers responsible for managing their own hierarchy levels (nodes) can make organizational administration and maintenance much easier.

To give a user admin access to manage hierarchies, see Giving Hierarchy Admin Access to Users. We recommend admin access is given only to one master user (ideally) or limited administrator level users, due to potential high-level impact.

Creating Hierarchy Data Structures

Large fleets can mirror their organizational structures within the Portal using hierarchy tree data structures. Hierarchy trees can mimic organizational structures, geographic areas, business units, service offerings, vehicle types, etc.

A fully configured hierarchy setup will include multiple classification trees, custom report groups, scheduled reports and alerts, distribution lists, and escalating alerts. After the hierarchy structure is in place and vehicles are assigned to it, these groupings will be available throughout the Portal for use in reports, dashboard, and maps. This structure enables users to view top-level parent node data and subsets of fleets known as child node data.

Naming Hierarchies

When defining tree structures and subtree names, consider how your business units are currently grouped. Use naming conventions that are familiar to users in relation to how they would classify and locate a vehicle.

Hierarchy name is limited to 30 characters.

Using Hierarchy Attributes

Attributes allow you to add custom, descriptive properties to individual hierarchy levels (nodes)–such as alert addresses, email lists, and timezones. When you apply an attribute to a hierarchy level, all members of that level (vehicles, drivers, landmarks and/or users) are automatically assigned to that attribute.

For steps on how to create hierarchy attributes, see Using Hierarchy Attributes.