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Hierarchical Assets

Assets can have a hierarchical relationship with asset components.

A hierarchical asset is an asset with a hierarchical structure that includes asset or product components. The hierarchical structure of a complex asset can include multiple levels and sublevels of asset or product components and subcomponents. There is no restriction on the number of levels or the number of components in a hierarchical asset. Asset components can be serialized or nonserialized. For example, a parent computer asset can have child assets, such as a motherboard (Part number M, Qty 1, Serial number 123), RAM (Part number RAM, Qty 16, no Serial number), and so on.

A customizable asset is an asset that is associated with a configurable product. You use Siebel Configurator to customize products. For more information about configurable products and Siebel Configurator, see Siebel Product Administration Guide.

Components of a hierarchical asset inherit some properties from the top-level asset. Changing the following fields of the top-level or parent asset of a hierarchical asset changes the same fields in all of the installed components: Account (and all account-related fields, for example, Site, Address Line 1, and so on), Owner, Ownership, and Organization.

Inheritance applies to a change that a user action or an automated process initiates. Changes to the components occur when a user updates the fields in the previous paragraph and saves the record. Users can update only the fields for the top-level asset. The fields of component assets are read-only.