Deriving/Passing In Characteristic Values

In An Illustration of a Bill Factor and Its Characteristics, we described how the system retrieves a characteristic value from a premise when a bill factor is encountered that uses a premise characteristic. This is a very common technique and is easy to understand. However, there are situations when an entity in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing doesn't contain the appropriate characteristic value and therefore other techniques must be used. These techniques may not apply to your implementation, but they're worth understanding to help you form an intuitive understanding of rate application:

• There are implementations that only use the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing rate engine. These implementations do not setup accounts, premises, etc. Rather, they simply setup their rate schedules, calculation rules, and bill factors. The rate engine is called from another application. This means the rate engine can't retrieve characteristic values from within Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing (because there are no objects where the characteristic values are defined). In this situation, the application that calls the rate engine must supply the characteristic types and values to be used when a bill factor requires this type of information.
• Assume you have a charge that is based on the account's customer class and the service agreement's revenue class. The characteristic value for this type of charge is not extractable through a single entity. Rather, the system must construct the characteristic value in real-time by concatenating information from the account and service agreement that is being billed. In this situation, you can use pre-processing calculation group to derive this characteristic type and value. This calculation group would create a characteristic type and value in real time by concatenating the account's customer class and the service agreement's revenue class. This characteristic type and value only exists in memory while the rate application executes.

When you setup a bill factor to use a characteristic whose value is derived or passed in, you need to define its characteristic source as Characteristics Collection. This source tells the system to extract the characteristic value from memory rather than extracting it from an object within the system.