Attributes

You use attributes to define the characteristic of a classification. There are two types of attributes: global attributes and customer-specific attributes. You can associate customers only with customer-specific attributes, not with global attributes. Customer-specific attributes can be associated with many, one, or no customers.

Global classifications and customer-specific classifications can each have both global attributes and customer-specific attributes. However, on a customer-specific classification, the customers that can be associated with a customer-specific attribute must be one of the customers who are associated with the classification.

Example

The customer-specific classification IT \ HARDWARE \ PRINTER can have these attributes:

Table 1. Customer-specific classification attributes
Attribute	Description	Global attribute?
SPEED	Pages per minute	Yes
QUALITY	Dots per inch	Yes
WEIGHT	Weight in Kg	No - WEIGHT is a customer-specific attribute

You manage printers for only Customers 1, 2, and 3. SPEED and QUALITY are common attributes for all printers and you set them as global attributes. Customers 2 and 3 want to record the weight of the printer. You set the WEIGHT attribute as a customer-specific attribute on the IT \ HARDWARE \ PRINTER classification and associate Customers 2 and 3 with WEIGHT. If a fault occurs on a printer and an agent creates a service request for Customer 1 and classifies the problem, only the SPEED and QUALITY attributes are copied to the specification table on the service request. If the service request is for Customer 2 or Customer 3, then all three attributes are copied.

Diagram of attributes for different customers. Details are in the text preceding and following the diagram.

If you win a contract with Customer 4 who also has printers and tracks their weight, then you must associate Customer 4 with the classification before you can associate Customer 4 with the WEIGHT attribute.