Changing Parent Customer

Introduction

Customers exist in a hierarchy in N2ACD. All customers apart from the root customers will have a parent customer:

Parent Customer Example

A customer in N2ACD may be either:

E.g. a customer chain may be four levels deep:

Service Provider -> N-Squared Software -> Example Main Customer -> Sub Customer 

In this example the Sub Customer has a direct path to the Service Provider root customer via Example Main Customer and then N-Squared Software.

In all cases, a customer:

Resources include:

Changing a customer’s parent customer from their current parent to a target parent customer is a validated process in N2ACD. This process requires that data integrity for all customer data is maintained after the change is completed. Arbitrary changes of the parent customer field without validation are not supported.

Hence, any change to a customer’s parent customer requires that:

  1. All resources referenced by customer flows are available to the target customer, and
  2. All resources referenced by flows in any child customer hierarchy of the customer being transferred are also available to the target customer.

In practice this requires all resources to be:

  1. Inherited by the current parent and the target parent via a shared root customer of both the current and target parent, or
  2. Be directly owned by the customer themselves.

Validation is performed based on the internal ID of each resource. A same-named resource available in both the current and target parent customer is not sufficient.

Change Parent Customer Wizard

To change a customer’s parent customer, use the small arrow icon next to the parent customer name:

Parent customer change icon

This will display a change customer wizard. In the first step of the wizard select the following:

Both the flow node restriction set and the termination number range set (if any) must be newly selected as the selected sets must be available to the target parent customer.

Parent customer wizard page 1

Once the new configuration is selected, click the Next button to move to page 2 of the wizard. N2ACD will check that the parent customer change can be achieved:

Parent customer wizard page 2

If no data integrity problems are identified when changing the customer’s parent to the target parent, the wizard will confirm this fact:

Parent customer wizard page 2 - Dependency check is ok

If a data integrity issue would occur when changing the parent customer to the target customer, the wizard on page 2 will display a summary of the problems:

Parent customer wizard page 2 - Dependency check is not ok

It will not be possible to continue with the wizard and complete the change parent process while dependency issues exist. Downloading the details of the problems will provide users with a detailed list of the data integrity issues that would occur if the parent change was allowed.

Cancelling the process at this stage is the only option available on-screen. No changes to the database will have occurred.

The spreadsheet details each type of resource and each record which is not available to the target parent customer. In the following screenshot a single announcement can be seen to be unavailable to the target customer (“MVNO”) and that this announcement is inherited by our customer from the root customer Service Provider:

Parent customer wizard page 2 - Dependency check details

If there are no dependency issues on the Check Dependencies screen, the parent customer change can be confirmed. Pressing the Save button will complete the parent customer change process and the transfer results will then be shown:

Parent customer wizard page 3 - Confirmation of Move

Once the wizard is closed the customer screen is reloaded and the new parent customer will be visible in parent customer field.