How to best use departments for multiple companies?

[JStockel]

Not sure if the right forum, but I'll shoot my shot.

Hi guys,
I'm wondering, how others has done, when they're working with multiple entities of one company. Like retail, hotel, restaurant chains, and so on.
How do you proceed, when there's the same kind of "department" within multiple different companies?

Let's say, we got Company A, B and C. 
They're all basically the same, just at different locations.
Company A, B & C got the same 5 departments. Department 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5.

How to set this up in ServiceNow? Since we can only OOTB from the Department table reference to one Company. Company related links got a list of its Departments. Any suggestions? Best practices? 
We've had an old setup, where we've simply setup all the entities under Department table. But that leaves us without departments. More and more requirements and needs, has surfaced to be able to pinpoint departments as well, such as "we want to see only people in Department 3 in Company B". Therefore, we need to try re-organize our structure.

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

If there are 4000 departments, you would likely have 4000 departments. I don't really see the issue. If you have 400 companies and each company has 10 departments, you just have that much data. There is nothing you can do about that. 
Can you tell me what kind of a solution you are looking for? Users are related to companies and to departments. If you would have 1 HR department that you use for 400 companies, you would have all HR employees on 1 department. That doesn't make sense, because they aren't in the same department. You are servicing 400 HR departments.

[Mark Manders]

To keep them 'simple' you could apply company codes to the departments. So Company Abc has departments 'HR - abc' and 'IT - abc', etc. That way you always know to which company they belong. Since they are completely unrelated entities (to each other), that shouldn't be a problem. 

[DineshS]

@JStockel Could you not leverage the parent field on the company record to create the hierarchy ?

I understand you are trying to limit the number of entries in the company table

[JStockel]

@Mark Manders  & @DineshS  yepp, what I was thinking partly too... But that would indeed, as Dinesh says, end up with a hell of a lot of departments... We're talking about 400 "companies" where they all got each about 10 different departments. That's just about 4000 departments... Then addition to some head quarter offices, with their business units too.

How would you Dinesh, recommend using the parent field on the company record? Setting up, let's say Company "MAIN" -> Company A -> Department 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5? Or do you mean to use Company table for departments instead?

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

If there are 4000 departments, you would likely have 4000 departments. I don't really see the issue. If you have 400 companies and each company has 10 departments, you just have that much data. There is nothing you can do about that. 
Can you tell me what kind of a solution you are looking for? Users are related to companies and to departments. If you would have 1 HR department that you use for 400 companies, you would have all HR employees on 1 department. That doesn't make sense, because they aren't in the same department. You are servicing 400 HR departments.