Logic | Regions, Locations, Venues, and Workplaces

Introduction

How does your company operate in the various locations you offer training? There might be unique catalogue considerations, not to mention alternate financial handling including currency and tax. Of course too, there’s the obvious: each location has a unique address, employs specific trainers and administration staff, and provides venues for students in the surrounding area.

In Administrate, the Regions, Locations, and Workplaces configuration item is designed to organize your training offering. This helps your administration staff better understand and support your offering, but more importantly - because location is a required field on every event you administer - the event logic is driven by the interrelationship between location and everything associated with it. The net impact of this is that your events automatically inherit all sorts of critical default logic the second you identify the location of the event.

How Many Regions Do I Need?

As you’re considering how to configure these elements, answer the following questions, identifying if you:

• Operate in distinctly different locations around the country or world?
• Have varied financial handling considerations, including currencies and tax rates?
• Need to segment my course catalogues for different types of learners?
• Have different subsets of learners and staff that vary by location?
• Have task workflows that vary significantly depending on the course offering?
• Have security / access concerns with who can see and update your CRM, courses, and event?

If your answer is yes to any of these, it’s likely you should use regional logic to segment one distinct offering from another. Let’s take a deeper look at this now.

Configuration Logic Hierarchy

From a logic perspective, companies are made up of regions which are made up of locations - more than one location can come together to create a workplace - and locations are made up of training venues. A depiction of the relationship looks like this:

From top to bottom then:

1. Companies are the highest level of configuration logic. Companies define:
   • Invoicing and other financial processing logic
   • Administration team user permissions, including:
     1. Account and contact permissions
     2. Course template and event permissions
     3. Review our Logic | Companies event to learn more about companies:
        
        
        
2. Regions are next.
   • Regions are required to be tied to a single Company
   • Regions define the following default logic:
     1. Event tax rate
     2. Event currency
     3. Event pricing
3. Locations are the next.
   • Locations are required to be tied to a single region. 
   • Locations define the following default logic:
     1. Everything inherited from Region
4. Workplaces are when two or more locations are linked together to define a working area that is valid for
   • Instructors to teach course content
   • Students to participate in learning
   • Resources
   • At least one location is required to create a workplace.
5. Venues are the most granular location value:
   • They are required to be tied to a location, and inherit all location default logic.

Region Example

It’s useful to think of the regions you create as distinct silos for the varying training offering you provide. Here are three examples that illustrate, with their important differentiating elements in red.

Company 1: American Training Services

Region 1: United States

• Locations:
  • Phoenix
    • Venue 1: Hotel Marriot of Scottsdale 
    • Venue 2: Rancho Manana
  • Los Angeles
    • Venue: ATS Home Office
  • San Diego
    • Venue: ATS San Diego
• Workplace: CA (includes Los Angeles and San Diego)
• Offering specifics:
  • Currency: U.S. Dollars
  • Tax Rate: 0%
  • Learning Mode(s): Classroom, Self-Paced, Blended
  • Catalogue: Business Software Training - Beginner and Advanced
    • Language: English

Company 2: ATS Europe

Region 2: Europe

• Locations:
  • London
    • Venue 1: ATS London Home Office
    • Venue 2: Hilton London
  • Edinburgh
    • Venue: Hilton Edinburgh
  • Munich
    • Venue: Hilton Munich
• Workplace: none
• Offering specifics:
  • Currency: Pound (GBP), Euro
  • Tax Rates: 20%
  • Learning Mode(s): Classroom
  • Catalogue: Business Management - Beginner and Advanced
    • Languages: English, German

Company 1: American Training Services
Region 3: ATS Internal

• Company: American Training Services
• Locations:
  • Online
  • Home Office
• Workplace: none
• Offering specifics:
  • Currency: n/a ($0)
  • Tax Rate: 0%
  • Learning Mode(s): Self-Paced, Blended
  • Catalogue: Onboarding, Security Compliance, Job Specific
    • Language: English

In the three regions above, you can see that each silo exhibits key differences that necessitate their segregation, which enables all of the following:

• Correct default currency and tax rates pull through to events based on location selection
• Catalogue segregation for each region; each region can be tied to a specific student portal to support learning specific to that audience
• User permissions; administration staff in “Region 2: Canada” cannot see or update CRM and course content they don’t work wit, which
• Staff and learners in “Region 1: United States” can be tied to the CA workplace, making their availability and automatic registration more simple

Locations vs. Venues

It’s not uncommon to wonder if you need to create venues in your instance, or if locations are enough all by themselves. At its most simple, the addition of venues allows you to create a logical one-to-many relationship in a given location. This also exposes additional data fields you can pull to your communication templates in order to support class participation.

For example, imagine that in the city of Phoenix, you have three different hotels where you offer training. In such a case, you are able to:

• Create each of the hotels as accounts, and mark that they are suppliers of venues
• Identify unique venue names, descriptions, and map coordinates for each of the three hotels
• Identify the location the venue is associated with, which is a requirement. In this case, all three hotels are in Phoenix
• Then, on the event, when you select Phoenix as the location, a dropdown menu allows you to pick from the three options you’ve created.

Note that if your location scenario is not terribly complex or does not require an account association, using location in a one-to-one manner works fine.

Your Next Decision:

Now that you’ve setup your regions, locations, venues, and workplaces, you want to get your training content into the TMS. Specifically, you want to create all needed course templates that make up your catalogue, adding all the metadata and default settings to make standing up your events a snap.