Displaying a Subset of the Company Family Tree

Introduction

This article describes an idea for an application that uses data from the D&B sandbox. The D&B sandbox uses a subset of business data from D&B’s database of over 215+ million business records. The business records are accessed through a cloud hosted API that provides a variety of functions for accessing company content.

Background

Each company location has a unique number called a DUNS number that is assigned to it. It is a unique 9 digit number assigned by D&B. It has existed for over 50 years and is used by business and government agencies. Once a DUNS number is assigned it remains with the business forever.

One of the basic functions available through the API retrieves Company Family Hierarchy information when a DUNS number is provided. (If you don’t know the DUNS number of the company there is another API call that can retrieve it.) This shows the legal structure of a company group or family, such as if it is the Headquarters, Parent, Subsidiary or Ultimate Parent. It can be used in a CRM to show related accounts or used to research the company for marketing purposes.

Overview

Our CRM system stores the DUNS number on the account record. With the DUNS number we can use the API to retrieve the company hierarchy or family tree. The problem is that we usually work with a subset of the locations in the company family tree so if we show the entire tree it can get confusing to determine which locations we actually work with.

What I propose would be to use the API to retrieve the complete family tree for a company and display it as a tree view. Then find the company records in our CRM that are in the tree and show them highlighted in some way. We can use this to quickly be able to see which subsidiaries we deal with and determine if we need to create new accounts or organize our existing ones to match the full tree.

History

Original Version.