Determining inheritance

In Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation, when an Enterprise is created it can inherit all or part of an existing Enterprise's configuration rules.

This inheritance is done at the configuration group level. A configuration group is a classification of similar configuration elements. For example, all of the rules and configurations dealing with items are grouped together into one configuration group and all of the rules and configurations dealing with organizations are grouped into another.

An administrator organization is set for every organization defined within the system. Only the administrator organization can modify the rules defined for a particular organization. If a particular organization administers multiple organizations, then they can load the rules of organization that it administers within the application tree.

Configuration groups are associated with organization levels. Organization levels determine how configuration groups are inherited and which organizations can maintain them. The organization levels defined in Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation are:

The Applications Manager does not load configuration data and permissions based on Data Access Policies.

Enhanced inheritance for process models

An Enterprise can inherit the configurations of the following entities from other Enterprises:

When an Enterprise inherits these entities from some other Enterprise, the current Enterprise can view the configurations that are inherited from all other Enterprises (including the Hub) in the inheritance hierarchy. In addition, the current Enterprise can view the configurations that are defined for the Hub.

For example, consider the following inheritance hierarchy:

Enhanced Inheritance Example

In this hierarchy, Enterprise E1 is inheriting from Enterprise E2, which in turn is inheriting from Enterprise E3. Enterprise E1 can view the configurations that are defined for Enterprise E2 and Enterprise E3. In addition, Enterprise E1 can view the configurations that are defined for the Hub.