About Usage Subscriptions

A Usage Subscription is an ongoing request to send one or more Service Points' usage to one or more external systems. The usage subscription defines which usage calculation group should be used to calculate service quantities (often referred to as bill determinants).

Usage subscriptions must reference a:

• Service Provider. The service provider is used as the identity of the subscribing system. In other words, you must set up a service provider for any system that subscribes to bill determinants.

• Contact: Contacts are individuals or business entities with which a company has contact. A contact exists for every individual or business related to a usage subscription. A single usage subscription can have many contacts, and a single contact may be referenced on many different usage subscriptions. Contacts have a 1-to-1 correlation with a "person" in a customer information system (CIS) and the CIS is considered the system of record for contact information.

An Aside: No Account Object Exists

Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management is not considered the system of record for accounts or Usage Subscriptions. The customer information system (or some other system) is considered the system of record for this type of information. In order to minimize the amount of data that must be synchronized between systems, account and service agreement oriented attributes used by the meter data products are held on Usage Subscriptions. For example, if an account's ID and its customer class are relevant to usage calculations, each Usage Subscription must reference both elements. This is an important distinction to keep in mind when creating custom Usage Subscriptions for your implementation.

Refer to About Usage Calculation for a broader functional view of the overall process.