Groups

Groups are a second dimension, not a place where equipment lives. A device is always assigned to an employee or to a warehouse. A group can hold a reservation on top of that.

That is what makes them useful for planning. You can put 100 devices into stock and reserve ten for the apprentices starting in September and twenty for a site opening later, so nobody else takes them in the meantime.

Departments are the obvious case, but they are not the interesting one. Project teams, regional teams, field sales, working students, external consultants: anything you would otherwise handle person by person is a candidate. Some groups come from your HR system, the rest you create yourself.

Category and Tags

These two fields look similar in the form and do entirely different jobs.

Category is for your own overview. It bundles groups into larger blocks, so Marketing, HR and Finance can sit under Corporate Functions while IT and Development sit under Technology. With five groups you will not miss it. With fifty, it is the difference between a structure and a list.

Tags reach beyond this screen. They decide what a group sees in the marketplace. Tag a service, give the same tag to the group, and the service appears for them and nobody else. Design software stays with the design team, premium phones with field sales, and you do not need a second catalogue for it. The same mechanism works on a single person, which is covered in Self-service tags.

So a tag is worth planning, a category is worth keeping tidy. If you are unsure whether something belongs in either field, ask whether it should change what people can order. If yes, it is a tag.

Naming and membership

Give each group a name that explains itself and use the description field. It feels unnecessary with four groups and saves you a lot of guessing at forty, when nobody remembers who is supposed to be in "Team Süd 2".

Memberships only help while they are current. When someone changes department, joins a project or moves into another role, the group is what carries their services and reservations with them.

A group can also hold a template, so its members receive a standard set without anyone assigning it individually. And it can have a manager, who sees the members and the resources reserved for the group. That is a practical way to hand responsibility to someone who is not tied to a single site.

Read more

GroupsAutomated Service Assignment with TemplatesPreparing Devices for Later Delivery

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Structure is done. Now build what people can request: Offer management.