Responsible Parties are a part of what we call Titles in UCM, and these Titles allow you to assign Users of your system to a Contract. What these roles define is completely up to you to decide, but they aren't just for labeling purposes. Responsible Parties have an important role in determining notifications and reminders as well.
Owner is another Title of UCM, but an Owner is required for every Contract, where Responsible Parties are an optional feature.
Enabling Responsible Parties
By default, Responsible Parties are not enabled. During your implementation though, this is a feature that would have been discussed with your product specialist, and normally it gets enabled at that time. If you've never had them enabled, or if you originally did not want them and have since changed your mind, enabling them is very easy. You'll just need to go to Company Admin --> Settings --> Edit Primary/Secondary/Tertiary Party Administration.
You'll want to first check the box at the top to use Responsible Parties (A), and then you can Enable each one individually (B). You DO NOT need to have all three turned on, and you can have any combination you'd like. You can also optionally have any or all of them Required (C).
Changing the Responsible Party Display Name
By default, each Responsible Party will display as either Primary, Secondary, or Tertiary in their respective dropdown menus. However, you have the ability to change the display name of each role to whatever you'd prefer. Doing so is as easy as typing in the name you want to display in the text field to the right, and then when you save, the name will be updated.
The names that you choose to have display here will be for your whole system. However, if you are an organization that has multiple objects, you can have different display names in your different objects. You can see which object you are changing your settings in at the top (A), and to change the names in other objects, you would switch over to the other object like you normally would and go to Settings to repeat the process above.
Where Responsible Parties Appear
Direct Entry & Contract Container
From either Direct Entry of a new Contract, or in the Contract Container itself, you assign a User of your system to one of these roles by selecting their name from a drop down menu. During Direct Entry, they are located right below the Owner dropdown (1). Inside of a Container, they are listed with all the other Contract Attributes on the Summary Tab (2), with their labels always visible, so you always know who should be contacted, or if a role is not filled.
If you have a different display name set, they will appear like in the image below:
Views & Reporting
You can use these Titles in your Views and Reports as both Criteria, and as data that can be displayed in your Grid as a Column Header. If you wanted to run a report to find all the Contracts where a certain User was listed as one of these Responsible Parties, simply select the correct role, (1,2, & 3), as your Criteria and enter the name into the text box that appears.
To have any or all of the Responsible Parties show up as data in your Grids, add the roles you want to include from the left side of the Column Header selector (A, B, & C) and move them to the right side.
Note: As of 11/8/2019, custom Display Names will NOT appear in this area. Only Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary will be displayed. Please reach out to your Local Administrators if you have any questions about which Role corresponds to which Responsible Party.
Workflow & Notifications
Responsible Parties can also be used to determine who gets notified through email about a Milestone, Workflow, Review, etc. Most notifications are set up by administrators, but some full access users have the ability to assign users to receive a notification of some kind from a Contract Container itself.
Whenever you see an Individual User selection box, the first four selections will be Owner, Primary, Secondary, Tertiary (1,2) assuming you have all three optional Parties enables. These allow you to assign that Role to receive the notification, and when the notification is ready to be sent out for the specific Contract, the system will first check what User, if any, is assigned to that role, and send the notification to them.
Note: As of 11/8/2019, custom Display Names will NOT appear in this area. Only Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary will be displayed. Please reach out to your Local Administrators if you have any questions about which Role corresponds to which Responsible Party.
Change of Ownership | Reassigning In Mass
Using Responsible Parties will also help you from an Administrative Level if you ever need to change ownership of multiple Contracts at once. Use this short Video Guide HERE, to see how you can quickly and easily change out either the Owner, or any of the Responsible Parties, with just a few clicks.