Managing Purchased Bundles

Modifying Bundles

You use Billing Care or Customer Center to modify bundles owned by customer accounts (for example, to transition to a new bundle).

You can change the valid bundle period or the charge offers associated with the bundle, and you can define prerequisites, mutually exclusive relationships, or transitions for bundles.

Configuring Bundle Dependencies

You can set up bundle dependencies that determine which bundles you allow a customer to own.

To be able to check that no bundle violates the prerequisites and mutual exclusivity rules, you need to enable bundle dependencies validation.

In PDC or Pricing Center, you can define dependencies between bundles that set up the following relationships:

Prerequisites: Specifies that an account must own a particular bundle to be able to purchase an additional bundle.

A prerequisite can contain bundles of different services. For example, to own a GPRS bundle, an account must own a GSM bundle.

A prerequisite bundle cannot contain item charge offers. When you create a package with alternate bundles, and if the base bundle contains an item charge offer, the purchase fails.
Required bundle: Specifies whether bundles are optional or required for packages. Required bundles must be purchased when a package is purchased, whereas optional bundles can be added to an account at any time.
Mutual exclusivity: Sets up a mutually exclusive relationship between two bundles, so if an account owns one bundle, it cannot own the other.
Allowed transitions: Specifies which bundles or packages can serve as replacements for others.

Transitions specify the bundles that customers can switch to and remain fully provisioned. While transitioning from one bundle to another, your customers retain their devices, such as phone numbers and services.

Customers owning bundles associated with a primary service may transition to other bundles associated with that primary service. The list of bundles displayed as available for transition are all associated with a specific primary service.

To enable the bundle dependencies validation.

Open the CM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf).
Uncomment the validate_deal_dependencies entry to enable the bundle dependencies validation:
```
- fm_utils validate_deal_dependencies 1
```
Save and close the file.
Stop and restart the CM.

Bundle Dependency Validations Involving Inactive or Canceled Charge Offers or Discount Offers

By default, BRM does not perform bundle dependency validations for inactive or canceled charge offers or discount offers.

To enforce bundle dependency validations for inactive or canceled charge offers or discount offers, you need to configure BRM to do the following:

Maintain any deleted charge offers in the /purchased_product objects to enable charge offer and discount offer validations.

To do so, set the value of the keep_cancelled_products_or_discounts entry to 1 in the pin.conf configuration file for Connection Manager. See "Deleting Canceled Charge Offers" for more information.
Perform prerequisite and mutual exclusivity rule dependency validation.

To do so, verify that the validate_deal_dependencies entry is uncommented in the pin.conf configuration file for Connection Manager.
Perform bundle dependency validations on inactive or canceled charge offers and discount offers.

To do so, enable the ProductLevelValidation business parameter in the /config/business_params object in the BRM_home/sys/data/config/bus_params_subscription.xml file.

By default, ProductLevelValidation is set to disabled.

Note:

BRM performs the purchase time dependency validations between bundles irrespective of the value of the ProductLevelValidation parameter.

Enabling Bundle Dependency Validations for Inactive or Canceled Offers

When BRM is configured to enforce bundle dependency validations for inactive or canceled charge offers or discount offers and a bundle A is the prerequisite of bundle B:

If bundle B is owned by the account, BRM will not allow cancellation or inactivation of any charge offers or discount offers of bundle A unless all the charge offers or discount offers of bundle B are in canceled or inactive state.
If any charge offer or discount offer of bundle A is in the canceled state, bundle B cannot be purchased.
If any charge offer or discount offer of bundle A is in the inactive state, bundle B can be purchased only in an inactive state; that is, all charge offers and discount offers of bundle B have to be purchased as inactive. All the charge offers or discount offers in prerequisite bundle A should be first activated before activating the charge offers or discount offers in bundle B.

Note:

BRM does not perform validations between the validity dates of the prerequisite and dependent bundles.

To enable this feature, run the pin_bus_params utility to change the ProductLevelValidation business parameter. For information about this utility, see "pin_bus_params" in BRM Developer's Guide.

To enable bundle dependency validations for inactive or canceled charge offers and discount offers:

Go to BRM_home/sys/data/config.

Create an XML file from the /config/business_params object:

pin_bus_params -r BusParamsSubscription bus_params_subscription.xml

In the file, change disabled to enabled:

<ProductLevelValidation>enabled</ProductLevelValidation>

Save the file as bus_params_subscription.xml.

Load the XML file into the BRM database:

pin_bus_params bus_params_subscription.xml

Stop and restart the CM.
(Multischema systems only) Run the pin_multidb script with the -R CONFIG parameter. For more information, see "pin_multidb" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.

Canceling Bundles

You can cancel all the charge offers in a bundle in one operation, or you can cancel individual charge offers. Canceling a bundle is particularly useful when a customer wants to upgrade. You can cancel all of the charge offers in the old bundle as a group before purchasing the new bundle for the customer's account. You can cancel a bundle immediately or backdate the cancellation of a bundle to a date earlier than the current date.

Note:

After you cancel a bundle, you cannot reactivate the bundle or the charge offers it contains.
You cannot cancel a required bundle. Instead, either transition to a new package or close the service associated with the bundle.