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About Assets in Siebel Communications

An asset is a product or product component that has been purchased by a customer and installed at, turned on at, or delivered to a customer site. An asset can be a physical product or a service product. Examples include phone pagers, phone handsets, telecommunications services, and Internet services that are active at specific customer sites. An asset is tracked at an asset number level. An asset has attributes, a configuration, and a location.

Asset data is stored in records that can be created, associated with other records, revised, examined, and printed. Asset records are used by customer service representatives (CSRs), field service representatives, service managers, account managers, support renewal agents, and contract administrators. The procedures described in this chapter are primarily used by customer service representatives. For more information about assets, see Siebel Field Service Guide.

Siebel Communications uses both the asset number and product name to track the asset. It is the combination of these two fields that makes an asset unique within Siebel applications. Therefore, the same asset number can be shared by different products. For example, a phone jack and a DSL connection can have the same asset number for different products.

Asset management and tracking are important parts of help desk applications and field service applications. Siebel Communications tracks purchases, allows you to create an asset before purchase, and allows you to track the asset's location. The location of serialized products and product components, is recorded, and the movement of these assets from inventory locations to customers or employees is tracked. Assets cannot be deleted, so even inactive services remain in the dialog boxes for selection.

End users can use these methods to create or modify assets in the following ways:

• Manually in the Assets screen.
• Manually in the Activity Part Tracker view, provided the product is serialized. This task is typically done by a field service agent. For more information, see Siebel Field Service Guide.
• Automatically using the Siebel Communications application's order management process. For more information, see Siebel Order Management Guide Addendum for Communications.

New or modified asset records can also be automatically received from an integrated third-party asset management application. For more information, see Siebel Enterprise Integration Manager Administration Guide.