Introduction

The Forsta Plus Hierarchy Management module provides an easy-to-use interface for building, verifying, updating, and maintaining hierarchies so your Voice of Customer, Voice of Employee, and/or Market Research programs can produce the highest quality results. This document is intended for the Hierarchy Administrator - the person who creates and maintains the hierarchies that will be used by the End User in their surveys and reports. This is a complete set of information that covers all the functionality available in the module. Note that separate documentation is available for the End User.

Comparison to Database Designer

Forsta Plus also has capabilities for designing hierarchies within the “Database Designer” module in Professional Authoring, which precedes the Hierarchy Management module. These modules share the same back-end, so hierarchies can be used very much in the same way regardless of which of the modules it has been set up in: You can use the hierarchy definition in a “hierarchy” question in a survey, either as a background variable or as a visible, normal question, and it can be reported on and also used as a personalized report filter so that you can set up role-based access to the reports for end users. In addition to providing a very different user experience, there are some key functional differences between the two:

• In the Hierarchy Management module, any change to the hierarchy definition is instantly live in any surveys or reports using the hierarchy. In the Database Designer module you make edits in a “Design” mode, and have to synchronize these changes to “Runtime” for them to update in surveys and reports.
• The Hierarchy Management module provides an interface for assigning contacts to hierarchy units. This capability is not available in the Database Designer module.
• The Hierarchy Management module supports giving end users (business users) access to edit the hierarchy definition. The Database Designer module is only available for Professional Users.
• The Database Designer module supports hierarchy definitions with node labels in multiple languages. Hierarchy Management supports one language only (English).

Hierarchies set up in Hierarchy Management cannot be opened in Database Designer, and vice versa. It is however possible to export a hierarchy definition from one and import it into the other.