AssetWise manages information in its database in an object-oriented way. Real life objects are identified with key identifiers; these are associated with a number of attributes or descriptors, providing more information about each object. The objects are then related to each other in hierarchical assemblies, or in one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many relationships, depending on the nature of the associated object.

Physical items are things that form part of a tangible system, either as single components, complete items or systems, or sub-sets of these. Such items are either procured, designed, fabricated, warehoused, assembled, distributed or maintained by the enterprise. In AssetWise, a physical item may be hardware, software or firmware, which is used, built, operated or maintained as part of the Enterprise process. The Item Manager plug-in is needed for the purpose of managing physical items, lists, and baselines.

You can select the Items explorer in the Navigation pane to expose all physical items in a tree structure, as shown in the following image.

Physical items may also be exposed in the Content pane as a result of a search for that type of AssetWise object. Fields that may be searched on are Description, Number and Approval status. The wildcard character % can be used in any field. With all fields blank and Status set to Any, the search returns the complete set of physical items that exist.

The following image shows a typical detail sheet of a physical item (in this example, the product MicroStation):

In addition to the tabulated details shown, many additional topics may be appended. If the physical item exposed is classed as a component, the Where Used topic can be expanded to show all structures containing this component.