Including Product Structures in the Installed Base
You must decide whether to include both components and parent items in the installed base. There are several advantages to having the product configuration in the installed base:
• Customer service can determine exactly what is in the configuration.
• If you move the item to a different end user, the entire configuration moves.
• If you replace one or more components during a service activity, you can update just those components in the installed base.
Tracking components is common in two situations:
• If the items you sell are subject to recall or contain components whose failure presents potential hazards, you may need to track individual components. Companies subject to government regulations often must keep detailed records about items and their components.
• If you sell configured products, you may want to keep track of which options an end user has. Some of the options may also be sold separately, and may have warranty terms that differ from the parent item. A personal computer is a good example of a configured product that can contain items also sold as products. For example, monitors and disk drives may be sold separately and tracked separately in the installed base.
The system can add product configurations to the installed base automatically if Load Available Structure is Yes in Service Management Control. This update occurs during invoice post or from Call Activity Recording.
Adding as-built configurations to the installed base automatically is possible only for items you manufacture or configure. If you track third‑party items, use Installed Configuration Maintenance (11.3.5) to add configuration information for them.
Note: When you add items to the installed base while you are recording service in Call Activity Recording, the system always adds them as first-level components of the call line item with which they are associated.
If SO Edit ISB is Yes in Sales Order Control, you can also indicate that an item sold is a component of a parent by specifying the parent item’s serial number and item number. The system then adds it as part of that item’s installed base configuration. The same is true in RMA Maintenance if Edit Installed Base is Yes in RMA/RTS Control.
Load Available Structure
The Load Available Structure field determines whether Invoice Post and Print adds product structures to the installed base. Setting this field to Yes only has an effect if certain other conditions are also true:
• The item must be one you manufacture or configure.
• Ship to Installed Base must be Yes.
• Installed Base must be Yes and the parent and each component to be added to the installed base must be service items in Service Item Maintenance.
• The item must be added to the installed base with a quantity of 1. The shipment quantity for configured items must be 1 and the work order quantity for serialized or lot controlled items must be 1 for the system to uniquely identify the as-built structure. Since lots seldom have a quantity of 1, Load Available Structure usually does not affect lot-controlled items.
• The parent item must be serial-number controlled, unless it is a configured product. A configured product on a final assembly work order can be identified without a serial number if it is shipped with a quantity of one.
If the product structure contains subassemblies, the parent item of the subassembly must be serial-number controlled for the system to attempt to find and add its components to the installed base.
If these conditions are met, the system attempts to add components of the parent item to the installed base as derived from the sales order BOM or the work orders used to build it and its components. This information is derived from the transaction history.
If Load Available Structure is No and Ship to Installed Base is Yes, only the parent generates ISB records. The components generate no details.
Transfer of Item Information from Sales and Work Orders
The installed base inherits item information based on the way the item was made or sold. This as-built configuration information comes from records generated in the Sales Orders/Invoices and Work Orders modules.
You can use either a final assembly process or a discrete work order to create configured items. Either process creates the transactions necessary to update the installed base with the actual components.
Note: Use Sales Order Release to Work Order (8.13) to create discrete work orders.
Components can only be added to the installed base when transaction history uniquely identifies the parent and components:
• A single work order for multiple parent items does not provide enough information in the transaction history to determine which serialized components belong to which parent.
• Transaction history is ambiguous if the work order for a component item is for a quantity greater than that required by the parent. The system loads components until the history becomes ambiguous.