This chapter provides guidelines to help you manage Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Business Operations Center.
Before you read this chapter, you should be familiar with how BRM works. See "BRM System Architecture" in BRM Concepts.
You use Business Operations Center to create, schedule, and view the results of the following operations:
Billing: Finds accounts that must be billed; calculates the balance due for each bill unit in the accounts, including all usage and cycle fees; and creates a bill for the balance due.
Collecting payments: Collects the balance due for accounts that use payment card (credit or debit card) and direct debit (cash) payment methods.
Invoicing: Generates invoices that list the events that were charged for and the customer's total account balance.
Generating general ledger reports: Generates general ledger (G/L) reports to collect G/L data for G/L accounts.
Synchronizing product catalogs: Synchronizes the catalogs stored in the BRM server with updated values from customers.
Refunding payments: Finds accounts that have refund items, and makes online refund transactions.
Tracking business trends: Shows business trends based on data generated by the preceding operations.
Business Operations Center calls the internal pin_job_executor utility to run the BRM utilities for these operations.
For more information about Business Operations Center, see the Business Operations Center Help.
You can configure and run only the following operations in Business Operations Center: billing, payment collections, invoicing, general ledger reports, product catalog synchronization, and refunds. Oracle recommends the following:
Because the operations that BOC can run often depend on other processes that BOC cannot run, determine whether you must supplement some of the operations run in BOC by running additional processes elsewhere in BRM.
For example, to process off-cycle (daily, weekly, quarterly, and so on) charges, you must run the pin_cycle_fees utility, which is not supported by Business Operations Center, from the BRM command line or as part of a daily cron job. Otherwise, a situation such as the following may occur:
Account A has a quarterly (three-month) billing cycle and receives 100 free minutes each month. The free minutes are granted by a monthly cycle forward fee, and they do not carry over to the following month. When Business Operations Center runs billing (pin_bill_accts), all pending cycle forward fees are applied. But for Account A, Business Operations Center will run billing only once every three months. At that time, three monthly cycle forward fees will be pending for Account A. Billing will apply them as follows:
Two past monthly cycle forward fees will grant Account A a total of 200 expired free minutes.
One current monthly cycle forward fee will grant Account A 100 free minutes that will be valid for one month.
Hence, if you do not use something other than Business Operations Center to process the monthly cycle forward fees that do not align with Account A's quarterly billing cycle, when Business Operations Center runs billing for the account once every three months and processes the two past-due monthly grants of free minutes at that time, those minutes will be unusable because they expire one month after coming due.
Do not run the BRM billing scripts (pin_bill_day, pin_bill_week, pin_bill_month) because they automatically run the same utilities (pin_bill_accts, pin_collect, pin_inv_accts, and so on) that Business Operations Center runs.
Do not use best pricing. It is incompatible with Business Operations Center.
For more information about performing operations in Business Operations Center, see the Business Operations Center Help.
By default, the ability to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) with the pin_job_executor utility is disabled. To enable secure communication between Business Operations Center and the Connection Manager (CM), you must configure SSL/TLS for the internal pin_job_executor utility.
To enable SSL for Business Operations Center:
Open the BRM_home/apps/pin_job_executor/Infranet.properties file in a text editor, where BRM_home is the directory in which BRM is installed.
Important:
Only administrators with write permissions can make changes to the Infranet.properties file.Search for the following line:
- infranet.pcp.ssl.enabled=false
Change false to true.
- infranet.pcp.ssl.enabled=true
Add the following entry:
- infranet.pcp.ssl.wallet.location=wallet_location/wallet
where wallet_location is the full path to the directory in which your Oracle wallet resides.
Add the following entry:
- infranet.pcp.ssl.wallet.filename=wallet_name.sso
where wallet_name is the name of your Oracle wallet.
Save and close the file.
By default, when Business Operations Center runs the internal pin_job_executor utility to generate invoices, the invoices are generated and rendered using Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher. If you use a third-party invoice application, you must configure the pin_job_executor utility to ensure that the generated invoices are not rendered in BI Publisher.
To render invoices in a third-party application:
Open the BRM_home/apps/pin_job_executor/Infranet.properties file in a text editor.
Important:
Only administrators with write permissions can make changes to the Infranet.properties file.Search for the following line:
- infranet.job.rendering=true
Change true to false.
infranet.job.rendering=false
The pin_job_executor utility will not render the invoices in BI Publisher.
Save and close the file.
You use the pin_generate_analytics utility to generate business metrics data for accounts by status, accounts by subscription, payments, billed revenue, and accounts receivable (A/R) and to load the metrics data into the BRM database. Business Operations Center displays graphs based on the business metrics data generated by the pin_generate_analytics utility.
You can run pin_generate_analytics manually or configure a scheduler, such as cron, to run it at predefined intervals. For more information, see "Generating Business Metrics Data".
The pin_generate_analytics utility generates and loads the following metrics into the BRM database:
Accounts by status: Generates metrics about the number of subscribers for each status at the time the utility is run: Active (10100), Inactive (10102), Closed (10103).
Accounts by subscription: Generates metrics about the number of subscriptions for each product at the time the utility is run based on the status of subscription: Active (1), Inactive (2), Closed (3).
Payment: Generates metrics about payments collected based on the payment type: prepaid (10000), invoice (10001), direct debit (10002), credit card (10003), cash (10011), and check (10012).
When you run the utility for the first time, data will be generated for the previous day. For subsequent runs, the start date is set to the last run date and the end date is set to the current date.
Billed revenue: Generates metrics about the amount billed and the number of bills generated.
When you run the utility for the first time, data will be generated for the previous day. For subsequent runs, the start date is set to the last run date and the end date is set to the current date.
Accounts receivable: Generates metrics about the A/R for the last one year with respect to month and the year.
When you run the utility, data will be generated for the previous 12 months from the date the utility is run.
To generate business metrics data:
Go to the BRM_home/apps/pin_generate_analytics directory.
Run the following command:
pin_generate_analytics[-parameter]
where parameter is one of the following:
acc generates business metrics data about the number of subscribers for each status at the time the utility is run.
subs generates business metrics data about the number of subscriptions for each product based on the status of subscription at the time the utility is run.
pymt generates business metrics data about payments collected based on the payment type.
billing generates business metrics data about the amount billed and the number of bills generated.
acc_recv generates business metrics data about the A/R for the last one year with respect to month and the year.
Note:
If you run this utility without parameters, data will be generated for all operations: subscribers, payment, billed revenue, and A/R.For more information, see "pin_generate_analytics".
When running the pin_generate_analytics utility to generate metrics data, you can improve performance by creating indexes.
To create indexes to improve performance while generating metrics data:
Go to the BRM_home/sys/dd/data directory.
Run the following command, which opens SQL*Plus:
sqlplus login/password@database_alias
where:
login is the login name to use for connecting to the BRM database.
password is the password for login.
database_alias is the BRM database alias.
Run the following command:
SQL>@ create_boc_pga_indexes.source
The indexes are created.
Run the following command, which exits SQL*Plus:
SQL>exit