Understanding Factors

Factor are a centrally stored set of values for use in validation rules, bill determinants calculations, and other processes.

A factor can have different values depending upon some definable attribute of a system object, such as customer size associated with a service point. Examples of factors can include minimum and maximum thresholds, loss factors, etc. Classes of factors are defined that can have numeric values (as in the above examples), or values pointing to profile measuring components, or VEE groups.

A factor's values are effective-dated values - either a number, a profile measuring component, a temperature profile measuring component, a VEE group, or some custom-defined value - assigned to a factor and associated to the value of some attribute of a system object. For example, consider a service point that can be classified as residential, commercial, or industrial. The tolerance percentage by which a customer's consumption can exceed last month's consumption can be based on the service point category.

For this example, factor values for a single factor called "tolerance percentage" could be:

• Residential - 20%
• Commercial - 10%
• Industrial - 5%.