1. PDC Creating Product Offerings
  2. Creating Pricing Components
  3. Pricing Configurations in Charge Offers

11 Pricing Configurations in Charge Offers

Learn about various pricing configurations that you can use in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) charge offers using Pricing Design Center (PDC).

Topics in this document:

See also "Configuring Charge Offers" and "Configuring Charges in Charge Offers".

Configuring Pricing Based on Quantity Ranges

To calculate a charge based on the amount of usage or frequency of occurrence, you can create quantity ranges in charge pricing. For example, pricing for a telephony service might contain the following quantity ranges based on the total duration of calls during a month:

  • No Minimum to 500 minutes: 10 cents per minute
  • 500 to 1000 minutes: 5 cents per minute
  • 1000 minutes to No Maximum: 1 cent per minute

Important:

If you enable Oracle Communications Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) to generate midsession rated events, note that each midsession event marks the end of a subsession of the network session. For the subsequent subsession, the network session's duration and volume counters are reset to 0. Therefore, if you use midsession rated events, do not base your pricing on cumulative duration or volume across an entire network session.

To define pricing based on quantity, you do the following:

  • Add quantity ranges and configure different balance impacts for each range. For example:

    • 0 - 10 minutes: 10 cents per minute

    • 10 - 60 minutes: 5 cents per minute

    • 60 minutes and above: 2 cents per minute

  • Specify how to apply the charge to the quantity ranges, which can be one of the following:

    • Pick the quantity range containing the value: ECE selects a single quantity range that contains the value of the quantity range expression. For example, if the customer uses 70 minutes, ECE charges $1.40 (70 minutes x $0.02 per minute).

    • Distribute value across applicable quantity ranges: ECE selects one or more quantity ranges that overlap the value of the quantity range expression. For example, if the customers uses 70 minutes, ECE charges $3.70 [(10 minutes x $0.10) + (50 minutes x $0.05 per minute) + (10 minutes x $0.02 per minute)].

When setting quantity range properties, you can also specify what happens when customers reach or exceed their credit limit for the charge. See "Allowing Customers to Exceed Their Credit Limit".

When you use quantity ranges in combination with time ranges, you can specify if the quantity consumed is relevant to a new time range. See "Rating Events Split across Time Periods" for information.

Configuring Pricing to Consume Granted Allowances Before Charging

You can create usage charges that consume a customer's granted allowances before charging for any usage. For example, you could create a usage charge that first consumes a customer's monthly allowance of free GBs of data and then charges $10 for any subsequent GBs used. You implement this functionality by adding quantity ranges to usage charges.

Note:

Consuming granted allowances before charging for usage fees is supported by the ECE rating engine only.

Figure 11-1 shows how to create sample quantity ranges in a usage charge using the PDC UI.

Figure 11-1 Sample Pricing for Consuming Free MegaBytes Before Charging


Description of Figure 11-1 follows
Description of "Figure 11-1 Sample Pricing for Consuming Free MegaBytes Before Charging"

This example specifies to first consume the entire balance of transferred MBs, then consume the entire balance of MB used, then charge 15 cents per MB for the next 200 MBs, and then charge 10 cents per MB for any subsequent MBs.

Using this example, assume a customer has 200 transferred MBs and 250 used MBs in a month. If the customer consumes 800 MBs of data in that month, ECE would deplete the 200 transferred MBs, deplete the 250 used MBs, charge $30 for 200 MBs, and charge $10 for the remaining 150 MBs.

You configure usage charges to consume granted allowances before applying charges by using:

Configuring Effective Dates for Pricing

You can apply a date range to a pricing configuration; for example, set a fixed start date and an end date. You can include multiple date ranges in a pricing configuration. This enables you to implement future price changes for a charge without creating multiple versions of the charge. For example, you could create a charge that has a $10 recurring charge valid for one month, and $20 after that.

Date ranges cannot overlap; for example:

  • Immediately through 6/1/2015
  • 6/1/2015 through 1/1/2016
  • 1/1/2016 through never ends

When configuring the charge offer, you can also configure whether customers who subscribe during one date range will keep the same pricing configuration after that range ends, or move to the pricing configuration on the next date range, and whether the pricing configuration is chosen based on the service instantiation date or the purchase date. See "Configuring How Pricing Configurations for Date Ranges are Applied" for more information about how the pricing configurations are determined.

About Defining Pricing Based on Multiple RUMs

To configure pricing for multiple RUMs within a charge, you use multiple price tiers, one for each RUM. Figure 11-2 shows a charge that contains two price tiers, Volume and Duration.

Figure 11-2 Volume and Duration Price Tiers

Description of Figure 11-2 follows
Description of "Figure 11-2 Volume and Duration Price Tiers"

About Price Overrides

A price override enables you to replace the balance impact of a record imported from another system or to adjust the balance impact by a specified percentage or a fixed amount. For example, you might charge for content downloads that have already been rated by another service provider. A price override enables you to charge a different amount.

About Fold Charge Pricing

A fold charge is used to zero-out a balance, such as unused minutes or to convert one balance to another.

A fold is configured using a charge selector. The event for the charge selector must be the Fold event. After you have configured the charge selector, select it in the charge offer.

The pricing in a fold charge should have a debit for the balance that you are converting and one or more credits for the balances that you are converting to.

Figure 11-3 shows the pricing for a fold that converts Frequent Flyer Miles balance to US Dollar balance, $1 for each frequent flyer mile.

Figure 11-3 Fold Pricing to Convert One Balance to Another

Description of Figure 11-3 follows
Description of "Figure 11-3 Fold Pricing to Convert One Balance to Another"

See "About Folds" for information about how fold balances are managed.

Granting First Usage Balances During Rating

ECE can grant first-usage balance impacts during rating. For example, you could create a charge offer that includes these balance impacts:

  • Debit 5 cents per minute if there are no included minutes.

  • Credit 1 minute for each minute paid at 5 cents per minute. These minutes are valid on first usage.

In this example, the charges occur as follows:

  1. A subscriber has used up all their included minutes, and is being charged 5 cents per minute.

  2. After ten minutes, the subscriber terminates the call. The subscriber is granted 10 minutes.

  3. The next call that the subscriber makes uses the ten minutes, granted as first-usage balance impacts.

You can also grant first-usage balance impacts by using a discount. For example, you could create:

  • A charge offer that charges 5 cents per minute.

  • A discount that credits one SMS message for each called minute.

In this example, the charges occur as follows:

  1. A subscriber makes a 10-minute call.

  2. The subscriber terminates the call. The subscriber is granted 10 SMS messages, valid at first usage, with a validity end date after 30 days.