RE: xCRL Question

["Ram Kumar" <rkumar@msi.com.au>]

Hi Joerg

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joerg Resch [mailto:joerg@bitwind.de]
> Sent: Tuesday, 29 April 2003 11:38 PM
> To: rkumar@msi.com.au
> Subject: xCRL Question
>
>
> Dear Mr. Kumar,
> let me first and foremost express my deep respect for the effort you
> have invested into CIQ making it the best source for designing CRM.

Thank you for your e-mail and your feedback. Appreciated.

> I have a small software/consulting company in Germany and we have just
> started to develop a CRM System based on the complete range of CIQ
> standards and extended with some own containers and elements
> within our
> own namespace. The system will be used by a German company offering
> conferences and congresses to certain vertical markets. They have been
> using direct marketing instruments to deliver millions of
> mailpieces to prospect customers inviting them to their events.

> So, CIQ is kind of taylor-made for the kind of relationship management
> needed in that company. The main aspect is to describe a party through
> itīs relationships with other parties, with places and with things. It
> is the relation which transforms data into valuable information to be
> used within 1:1 relationship management.

> And this exactly is the point of my question (please regard
> me as a dump
> non-technical person trying the first time ever to understand an XML
> Schema): A "customer" of type "person" has a relation to a place of
> residence which is his private adress where he has a private phone
> number and a private fax. If he changes his residence, then his phone
> number may become invalid because it has a relation to the
> current place
> of residence. This is clear. But what about the personīs contact
> information which depends on his relationship to another "customer" of
> type "organisation", with which he has a work contract and is employed
> holding a certain "position"? Do I store all contact and adress
> information depending on his current employment (which is the most
> important one for our use case) at "Customer/PersonInfo" and
> "Customer/AdressInfo" or is it part of a relationship record? This
> question just doesenīt want to let me sleep anymore :)

Any change of address and phone or fax numbers can be tracked by xCIL/xCRL.

If Person X has a contract with Organisation Y, then under xCRL, Person X
is a "Customer" "IN RELATIONSHIP WITH" Organisation Y which is a "Customer"
and under "Customer" you store the address, phone and fax details.

The Relationship Information element is used when you have common entities
between the person and his relationships. For example, Mrs&Mr. James Johns
living at the same address and with the same number. Here Mrs Jones has a
relationship with Mr.Jones (wife-husband)
and their common entities will be stored under "Relationship Record"
element.

> Could you help me?

Is this helpful? If I have mis-understood what you say, can you draw me a
simple
diagram showing the relationships you want and the attributes of customer? I
will then
be able to clearly show how to represent it in xCRL.

> Best Regards
> Joerg Resch
>
> BTW, if you donīt mind, one feedback: If it was me, I would have not
> used the term "Customer" with attribute "PartyType" for describing a
> party, I would have preferred "Party". The reason is that we are using
> the term "customer" for a party who/which has actually done business
> with the party running the system. This is only a small percentage of
> parties managed by the system. Most of the records are non-customers,
> like
> - interests
> - potentials
> - non-reactings
> - robinsons (party who/which refuses to become a customer; needed to
> actively avoid contact)
> - zombies (party who/which cannot be contacted anymore)
> - suppliers
> - ...

Well, we did consider this. Given that we define customer as anyone listed
above
by you in addition to person, company, groups, non profit, etc. we decided
to keep in as
"Customer". But we will seriously consider this feedback in our next
version. To us,
anybody you deal with and have their details is a customer.

Thank you once again for your support and feedback.

Kind Regards,

Ram