Thank you both for your responses.
I should mention that ocasionally we move equipment around in the hierarchy and would therefore want the equipment to automatically inherit a new set of characteristics and values depending on where it has been moved to.
From the example below, if Equipment 1 and 2 switched places, we would want Equipment 1 to inherit Characteristic B and Equipment 2 to inherit Characteristic A.
-> Functional Location 1a (Characteristic = A & Values)
---> Functional Location 1b
-----> Functional Location 1c
--------> Equipment 1 (Inherits Characteristic = A & Values)
-> Functional Location 2a (Characteristic = B & Values)
---> Functional Location 2b
-----> Functional Location 2c
--------> Equipment 2 (Inherits Characteristic = B & Values)
The standard system appears to support inheritance of classes and characteristics between functional locations but not characteristic values.
Inheritance of classes and characteristics does not appear to be supported between functional locations and equipment due to them having different class types (002 and 003 respectively)
It looks like we might have to develop something to get around these limitations!
Thanks again