Association

Most contact management software is hierarchical - i.e.: a company owns one or more contacts that belong exclusively to that company:

• Company 1
  • Contact 1
  • Contact 2
• Company 2
  • Contact 3
  • Contact 4
  • etc.

Hence Contact 1 is known only to Customer 1 and will be deleted if Company 1 is deleted..

Epic is different. In Epic, companies (and their specialisations), products (and their specialisations) and contacts are all first-order, stand-alone entities. They do not belong to any other entity. However each can be associated with any number of the others. An association records that there is (or was) a relationship between two records. It records:

• a description of the relationship : e.g. 'Managing Director', 'Owned By'
• whether this relationship is current (defaults to true)
• optionally, a start date for the relationship
• optionally, an end date for the relationship

Epic can record associations between:

• companies (and their specialisations), and contacts
• products (and their specialisations) and customers (a specialisation of company)

Hence, for example, a contact record can be associated with several customer records to track perhaps their employment history or the fact that they are employed by multiple organisations at once. In the same way, within ship repair a vessel's ownership history can be tracked.

Associations are shown and edited via the main editors for each type of record:

a contact's company associations (read-only) :

a vessel's customer associations (read-write) :

 

See also:

• company
• contact
• customer
• product
• vessel

How To's:

• create a new association