This chapter provides general information and advice on how to use Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) Suspense Manager to process your suspended call records.
For an overview of Suspense Manager and it's capabilities, see "About Suspense Manager".
For instructions on how to set up and configure Suspense Manager, see "Configuring Suspense Manager".
For instructions about using Suspense Management Center, see Suspense Management Center Help.
You can define search criteria to edit, delete, recycle, and write off a large number of suspended records. You define the search criteria for a specific action, such as edit, recycle, write off, or delete, in Suspense Management Center. Suspense Manager opcodes then perform the specified action on all the records that meet the search criteria and are in a valid state for the action.
For instructions on performing actions on a large set of data, see Suspense Management Center Help.
To avoid a large database transaction during bulk operations, you can specify the number of records to process in each transaction in a bulk operation. Based on the number you specify, Suspense Management Center and the pin_recycle utility perform several transactions to process the records in the search result. See "Configuring the Number of Suspended Records to Process in a Transaction".
CSRs who perform operations on large numbers of records require specific permissions that allow these operations. For a list of permission types for Suspense Management Center, see "Suspense Management Center Permission Types" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.
During recycling, Suspense Management Center lets you process call records and batched call records that do not pass your pipeline validation rules.
This override feature allows you to capture and temporarily hold suspicious calls in a suspended state until you can inspect them. If they pass inspection, you can override your validation rules and recycle the calls to capture the revenue they represent. The reasons for suspended CDR file are separate from those or individual CDRs and must be handled separately.
You select the override reasons from the Suspense Management Center Recycle screen. The suspense reasons are then overridden for all of the calls in that recycle CDR files. This directs Suspense Manager to successfully process the individual CDRs or CDR files, even though they do not pass your pipeline validation rules.
The list of override reasons offered to Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) during recycling is configurable. You can change the list at any time by editing the BRM_Home/sys/data/config/pin_suspense_override_reason file, and then loading it into your database by using the load_pin_suspense_override_reason utility in the BRM_Home/bin directory. BRM_Home is the directory where you installed BRM components.
Important:
The load_pin_suspense_override_reason utility requires a configuration file to function correctly. For details, see "Creating Configuration Files for BRM Utilities" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.For example:
%load_pin_suspense_override_reason pin_suspense_override_reason
For details on this utility, see "load_pin_suspense_override_reason".
The list of CDR file override reasons offered to Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) while resubmitting them is configurable and is separate from the override reasons for individual call records. You can change the list at any time by editing the BRM_Home/sys/data/config/pin_batch_suspense_override_reason file, and then loading it into your database by using the load_pin_batch_suspense_override_reason utility in the BRM_Home/bin directory.
Important:
The load_pin_batch_suspense_override_reason utility requires a configuration file to function correctly. For details, see "Creating Configuration Files for BRM Utilities" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.For example:
%load_pin_batch_suspense_override_reason pin_batch_suspense_override_reason
If you upgraded from standard recycling to Suspense Manager, you will have two types of call records in your database. Call records created using standard recycling use the default /suspended_usage fields, and have a suspense reason of Other. Records created under Suspense Manager will have a type that corresponds to your custom subclasses of /suspended_usage, and have the suspense reasons you created during the Suspense Manager installation and configuration process.
The records you created using standard recycling can be recycled, written off, and deleted using Suspense Management Center. To search for all records created under standard recycling, search for call records with a:
type of /suspended_usage
Suspense reason of Other.
To limit the search further, enter the values for any of the /suspended_usage fields used by standard recycling.
Standard Recycling does not produce CDR file suspense records.
This section contains fixes to common Suspense Manager problems.
If the searches you run in Suspense Management Center return particularly large results, your performance may slow noticeably, or you may get "Out of memory" error messages. The solution is to increase your maximum heap size. The exact amount varies greatly with your needs and system resources. If performance is very bad or you get "Out of memory" messages frequently, start by doubling the maximum heap size to 128 MB. Remember, however, that making the heap size too large will degrade the performance of other processes.
There are two ways to increase the maximum heap size, depending on whether you have standalone or WebStart BRM implementations.
Edit the BRM_Home_dir/lib/runSMC.bat file to increase the heap size (memory allocation pool) to solve "Out of memory" messages.
By default, Suspense Management Center has a maximum heap size of 64 MB. This variable is controlled by the -Xmx size entry in the Suspense Manager Center startup line in runSMC.bat. No -Xmx size entry is present in the startup line by default. To increase the heap size, add this entry and a number (in megabytes) to the Suspense Management Center startup line.
This example adds a 128 MB maximum heap size to Suspense Management Center:
@start C:\PROGRA~1\COMMON~1\PORTAL~1\JRE\bin\javaw.exe -Xmx128m -cp ".;%SMCDIR%;%SMCDIR%\lib;%SMCDIR%\lib\suspensemgtmain.jar;%SMCDIR%\lib\pfc.jar;%SMCDIR%\3plibs\jh.jar;%SMCDIR%\lib\pcmext.jar;%SMCDIR%\lib\pcm.jar;%SMCDIR%\lib\Suspense_Management_Help_en.jar;%SMCDIR%\lib\Application_Center_Help_en.jar;" com.portal.appcenter.AppCenterMain suspensemgtsuite
Important:
Be sure to precede and follow the -Xmx size entry with a space.Stop and restart Suspense Management Center to make the change take effect.
Open your SuspenseManagement_locale.jnlp file.
Change the j2se element to include a max-heap-size attribute.
The default entry looks like this:
<j2se version="1.4*"/>
For example, this entry changes the maximum heap size to 128 megabytes:
<j2se version="1.4*" max-heap-size="128m"/>
Note:
The max heap size specified in the JNLP file is used for all associated Suspense Management Center clients.Stop and restart Suspense Management Center to make the change take effect.
Your pipeline output section must contain a MaxErrorRates module containing at least one entry. If this entry is missing, your log files will contain a misleading message like this one:
"16.11.2004 21:00:37 All checks are successful. File can be recycled."
The more call records you attempt to edit, recycle, delete, archive, or archive then delete, the longer it takes. It is impossible to say exactly how long because every implementation is different, but 30,000 records will take a few minutes, and recycling 300,000 records will take many minutes.