Items best practices

Hello,

We have some assembly and kit items that we sell (servers that have some additional components that we install).  Some of those internal components can be sourced from different vendors.  Note that they are not the exact same product (as opposed to buying a precisely spec'd screw from multiple suppliers, for example); but they are functionally equivalent.  The cards that we use on a particular customer system may vary w/o the sales team's knowledge.

My question is, how should I structure my items and assemblies?  Would it be good to just have a generic "component" item with a preferred vendor?  Then I could have just one assembly with the generic component, but would I lose the ability to know exactly what item was sold to the customer?  Or should I have a unique item for each vendor, and then have different assemblies based on the internal component?  This presents us challenges because the sales person doesn't know (and shouldn't know) what the internal component will be.  Just more stuff to confuse them...