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Guidelines for Designing Products with Components

You can minimize order problems if you avoid adding the same product to more than one relationship in a customizable product. If you restructure the customizable product and publish a new version, the Auto Match business service in Siebel Configurator may not pick the correct relationship for the item if transactional data (for quotes, orders, and assets) based on old versions of the product is reconfigured. For more information see Auto Match Business Service for Siebel Configurator.

CAUTION:  Be sure that the configurable products have a valid solution for all initial conditions. It is possible to create a configurable product that does not have a valid solution for certain initial conditions, so that this product cannot be instantiated at all. For example, this problem may occur when a set of hard constraints, based on the linked items, is violated. However, this will lead to an internal error in the Siebel Configurator engine.

Guidelines for Asset-Based Ordering

If you are designing products with components and you use asset-based ordering, the best practice is to avoid creating require rules that add items that are not tracked as assets to a customizable product.

For example, you write a require rule that adds a one-time charge for Installation to a customizable product. You do not set the Track as Asset flag for Installation in its product record. This means Installation does not display as a customer asset.

Then the customer requests an addition to the service. The call center agent selects the service, clicks Modify, and starts a configuration session. the Siebel Configurator engine adds Installation, because it is required by configuration rules. Installation is transferred to the quote even though it is not required by the service modification.