How to link one table with several other tables?

I'm a beginner in SQL and I'm curious about one thing. If this problem is already solved, please just give me a link.
So there is the problem:
Let's suppose that you have several tables (Customers, Suppliers, Shippers) and those tables have different structure (fields). Of course, there's some similarities between them: every one of them has field named Phone Number, say varchar(20). Then your boss says he wants to buy PABX with some functionality, which requires that all phone numbers have to be in one single table, and that new table needs some new structure with few prefixes and phone number, and some other things.
So that is my question: if I have one table that contains some structured data type, and that data type is member of several other tables with different structure, how to link data from one table to several others? How to create relationship bet ...