What are ADUs and when should they be used

What are ADUs?

ADUs in Appogee HR refer to “Appogee Divisional Units”, and are a way to segment data into divisions, allowing you to delegate administrative tasks such as configuration of Employees, Teams and Company Documents to specific Users. ADUs can also be hierarchical, allowing you to delegate different users various levels of access to your data.

Please note that in order to provide minimal impact to smaller organizations, ADUs are disabled by default, and need to be enabled if you wish to take advantage of them.

Why are ADUs used?

ADUs are useful for larger companies comprising of different divisions which operate independently from each other from an HR perspective, whilst still allowing data access and management across divisions for more senior personnel.

ADUs can add extra complication to the management of your HR data in Appogee HR. Because of this, ADUs are not recommended for small companies.

ADUs are often used for international companies, where offices operating in different countries require separate HR Management. In these cases, there might be HR Managers responsible for the employees within a particular country, and a global HR Manager responsible for all employees within the company.

ADU Concepts

ADUs can be enabled from the System Config page of Appogee HR. To enable ADUs, an existing user with the HR Manager role must be delegated with the ADU Admin role. More information on how to enable/disable ADUs can be found here.

The ADU Admin role allows users to manage ADUs, including creation/deletion, and the ability to move data between ADUs. ADU Admins have access to all data in Appogee HR, regardless of the ADU they are assigned. This differs from the HR Manager role, where HR Managers only have access to the data that resides in the same ADU to which they are assigned. 

Role management can be performed from the Roles & Access page. You can find more information about how to assign this role here.

Appogee HR allows up to 2 levels of ADU to be created. This creates a hierarchy, allowing HR Managers in a higher ADU to be able to manage data in a lower ADU. 

Please get in contact with Appogee HR Support if you wish to enable another level for ADUs.

The ADU in which a user is assigned is determined according to the Team they are a member of. An easy way to think of it is that an ADU contains Teams, and a Team contains Users. As an example, consider the data structure below:

Example ADU Structure

In the above example, our fictional company, Tralliant, has 4 ADUs.

The “root” ADU is referred to simply by the company's domain name: tralliant.com. 

Under this are 2 sub ADUs - France and UK. The uk also has a sub ADU of its own - London

The root division contains the Directors team, in which an employee, James Smith, has been granted the HR Manager role. As James Smith resides in the root ADU, his HR Manager role filters down to the 3 sub ADUs (France, UK and London). 

The France ADU also contains a user, Thomas Park, with the HR Manager role. In this case, Thomas Park only has access to employee data within the France ADU.

Similarly, the UK ADU has an employee, Vickie Borg, with the HR Manager role, but because the UK ADU has its own sub ADU, Vickie Borg has access to employee data in both the UK and London ADUs. 

Finally, an employee, Charlotte Watts, in the UK/London ADU has been granted with the ADU Manager role. This is a powerful role which grants access to data in all ADUs. Therefore, despite the fact that Charlotte is located in a 3rd level ADU, she has access to employee data in all 4 ADUs, including the root ADU.