7 Customer MDM with Communications Agent Assisted Billing Care

This chapter discusses the interoperable group of pre-built integrations: Oracle Customer Master Data Management Integration Base Pack (Customer MDM: Base), Oracle Customer Master Data Management Integration Option for Siebel CRM (Customer MDM: SBL CRM), Oracle Customer Master Data Management Integration Option for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (Customer MDM: Comms BRM) and Siebel CRM Integration Pack for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management: Agent Assisted Billing Care (Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care). This chapter includes the routing rules that must be changed to enable interoperability.

This chapter contains the following sections:

• Section 7.1, "Customer Flows in Customer MDM"

• Section 7.2, "Customer Flows in Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care"

• Section 7.3, "Best Practices for Flows"

• Section 7.4, "Merge Process in Customer MDM"

• Section 7.5, "Merge Process with Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care"

• Section 7.6, "Best Practices for Using the Merge"

• Section 7.7, "Routing Rules Configuration"

7.1 Customer Flows in Customer MDM

Upon creation of a new customer in Siebel Customer Relationship Management (Siebel CRM), the Oracle Customer MDM integration sends the customer data to the Oracle Customer Hub. The customer data then goes through a sanitation process within the Oracle Customer Hub where it is cleansed, standardized, matched, and linked to other existing customer entries and possibly enriched. The updated customer data is then returned to Siebel CRM and published to other subscribing applications.

7.2 Customer Flows in Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care

In the Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care integration, upon an update of the customer data, the customer data is published to Oracle Application Integration Architecture (Oracle AIA). If the customer data is cross-referenced in Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM), then Oracle AIA applies the updates to the customer data in Oracle BRM.

When the two integrations are used together, the flow in the Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care integration that updates the customer data from Siebel CRM to Oracle BRM is performed as usual. In addition, customer data updates are published as a customer data sync from Oracle Customer Hub to Oracle BRM. This is done as a batch publish, enabling the delay introduced in the batch ensures that the updates from Oracle Customer Hub come to Oracle BRM after the updates from Siebel CRM.

Figure 7-1 shows the functional steps when updating account level customer data:

Figure 7-1 Updating Account-Level Customer Data Across MDM Customer and AIACOM Flows

Figure 7-2 shows the functional steps when updating contact level customer data:

Figure 7-2 Updating Contact-Level Customer Data Across MDM Customer and AIACOM Flows

For more information, see the Oracle Application Integration Architecture Customer Master Data Management Integration Pack Implementation Guide and the Oracle Application Integration Architecture Siebel CRM Integration Pack for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management: Agent Assisted Billing Care Implementation Guide.

7.3 Best Practices for Flows

These are the recommendations:

• The Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care flow for updating the customer data from Siebel CRM to Oracle BRM does not change when used with the Customer MDM integration.

• The sync customer message published by Oracle Customer Hub upon updating customer data is published to Oracle BRM as well.

  The routing rules and the Oracle BRM provider check if a cross-reference for the customer data exists and, if so, it uses the data published to update the existing customer. If the cross-reference is not found, then the data published by the Oracle Customer Hub is discarded.

• Publishing from Oracle Customer Hub to Oracle BRM is done in batch.

  How often the batch must be run depends on specific deployment conditions. It can be set from near-realtime sync (minimum delay in the batch) to a daily batch. Factors that must be considered in determining the frequency of the batch publishing include: frequency of bill cycles, performance impact, and possible requirements for having near-realtime updated customer data in the billing system.

• When interoperating with applications that do not support a merge process, if you used the merge in Oracle Customer Hub, it is recommended that you turn off the publish to the participating applications.

  For more information, see Section 7.6.1, "To Disable the Publish Process".

• To enable functional interoperability, the AIA configuration property ProcessUpdateEventsOnly must be set to false when both of these integrations are deployed. The default value for this property is false, but certain flows require that this property is set to true. You must change this configuration property based on the flows being used:

  • If customers are only using the Create Customer and the Update Customer flows in the MDM Customer integration, then the ProcessUpdateEventsOnly property must be false.

  • If customers are only using Comms Order to Cash and Comms Agent-Assisted Billing Care, then the value of the flag must be set to true. This is an optimization guideline, in that in the Comms flows, customer creation is enabled through the order flows. Consequently, setting the value to true ensures that only update events are propagated outward from the Siebel CRM customer sync requestor service.

  • However, if customers are using both Customer MDM and Comms Order to Cash or Comms Agent-Assisted Billing Care, then the property must be false to enable the creates from Siebel CRM to be propagated to the Oracle Customer Hub.

7.4 Merge Process in Customer MDM

In the Customer MDM integration, the merge functionality is a core function that allows a data steward to effectively determine a survivor record among several duplicate records, or to create a new record to consolidate several duplicate or similar records. For this process, Oracle Customer Hub publishes the results of the merge by providing the survivor record and one or many victim records to the source systems. It is up to the source systems to determine whether they can or should consume this message in their own records. Although some participating applications have the ability to request a merge operation, only customer merges executed within Oracle Customer Hub are supported for this release.

7.5 Merge Process with Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care

Siebel CRM has the capability and a service to merge records and re-parent the associated entities to reflect the merge performed by Oracle Customer Hub. Unfortunately, Oracle BRM does not offer a service to support this feature. Obviously merging accounts or contacts in Siebel CRM without merging the corresponding accounts or contacts in Oracle BRM is not a feasible option since it is not possible to retrieve invoice details for victim accounts or submit change orders related to assets parented to victim accounts.

Clients can develop ad-hoc procedures and tools so that administrators can merge customer data in Siebel CRM and in Oracle BRM to be consistent with the merge data in Oracle Customer Hub. This would be a custom solution not supported by the delivered flows.

7.6 Best Practices for Using the Merge

The following are the recommendations for using the merge process:

• Account or contact merges can take place only in Oracle Customer Hub.

• Merge messages from Oracle Customer Hub are routed to all target applications registered within Oracle Customer Hub, including Oracle BRM.

• Merges are not done in Oracle BRM when receiving a merge message.

  The Oracle BRM provider checks the cross-reference for the survivor customer data and if it exists, updates the survivor customer data. This is the same behavior for a sync message on the survivor.

7.6.1 To Disable the Publish Process

When interoperating with applications that do not support a merge process, if you used the merge in Oracle Customer Hub, it is recommended that you turn off the publish to the participating applications.

Therefore, for Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care processes that interoperate with MDM for Customer processes, when a merge happens in Oracle Customer Hub, it should not be published to the CRM or BRM instances that participate in the Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care integration. If the merge is published to Siebel CRM, and the cross-references are updated, then the billing management and customer update flows break.

Perform these steps to turn off the publish after the merge:

1. Query the Oracle Customer Hub Process Merge Request workflow from Siebel tools.

2. Click Revise to revise the workflow.

3. Set the value of the process property EnablePubSub = False.

4. Deploy the workflow.

For more information, see the Siebel Book Shelf: Application Development, Siebel Business Process Framework, Workflow Guide.

7.7 Routing Rules Configuration

For Customer MDM and Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care interoperability, configuration depends on the order of deployment.

• If the Customer MDM integration is deployed first, and then the Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care integration is deployed, no routing rules changes or additions are required.

• If the Comms Agent Assisted Billing Care integration is deployed first, and then the Customer MDM integration is deployed:

  1. Use the deployment plan MDMCustomerEBSDP.xml at $AIA_HOME/pips/MDMCustomer/DeploymentPlans to redeploy CustomerPartyEBSV2 with overwrite flag set to true by updating the deployment plan as follows:

     <Composite compositeName="CustomerPartyEBSV2" compositedir="${AIA_HOME}/pips/MDMCustomer/EBS/CustomerParty/CustomerPartyEBSV2" revision="1.0" overwrite="true" wlserver="pips.MDMCustomerBase" action="deploy" />

  2. Comment out the rest of the composites and run the MDMCustomerEBSDP.xml deployment plan.