1 About Creating Product Offerings

Learn how to create product offerings for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) in Pricing Design Center (PDC).

Topics in this document:

• About Pricing Components

• About Pricing Setup Components

• Prerequisites for Creating Product Offerings

• About Changesets

• Making Changes to Your Product Offerings

• About Product Offering Ownership

PDC includes sample product offerings for a broadband service and for a telco service in the PDC_home/apps/samples/data directory, where PDC_home is the directory in which PDC is installed.

About Pricing Components

BRM allows you to configure product offerings that you sell to your customers. You configure the prices and terms for the products you sell in PDC.

In PDC, your product offerings are called packages. A package groups charges and discounts together. Packages can also be associated with terms that govern the agreement between you and the customer who purchases the package.

Before assembling a package, you use PDC to create the pricing components that constitute the package:

• Charge offers: Charge offers define the charging rules, deliverables, and taxes for using your services. For example, a charge offer could specify to:

  • Charge $35 per month for an online newspaper service

  • Grant 25 newspaper articles per month

  • Charge 10 cents per minute for mobile voice usage

  • Charge a one-time $50 installation fee

• Discount offers: Discount offers define the rules for applying discounts to charges. For example, a discount offer could specify to:

  • Apply a 50% discount to the first six months of a newspaper subscription

  • Provide the first 500 minutes of a service for free

  • Provide every fifth movie download for free

• Terms: Subscription terms specify how long the customer must commit to the service, what happens if they cancel early, and when the subscription period ends.

  For example, the terms for a telephony service might specify a 1-year commitment with a 1-month grace period, after which an early termination fee of $25 is applied. The subscription automatically renews after one year.

After you create charge offers, discount offers, and terms, you group them into the following pricing components:

• Bundles: Bundles group charge offers and discount offers together for a single service. For example, you could create:

  • A bundle for a cable service that charges $50 per month for a standard subscription and premium channels, and provides a 20% discount for the first six months of the standard subscription.

  • A bundle for an Internet service that charges $65 per month for high-speed internet and $9 per month for a modem rental.

  Bundles can also be associated with terms.

• Packages: Packages contain one or more bundles. You use packages to offer multiple services to subscribers. For example, you can include two bundles: one for an Internet service and one for a conferencing service.

  Packages can also be associated with terms, and those terms govern any required bundles. Optional add-on bundles can be governed by separate, preset terms.

• Package lists: Package lists contain a group of packages offered to a single type of subscriber, such as those in a regional group.

Figure 1-1 shows how charge offers and discount offers are organized into bundles and packages with associated terms.

Figure 1-1 Grouping Offers into Bundles and Packages

Description of "Figure 1-1 Grouping Offers into Bundles and Packages "

About Pricing Setup Components

Before configuring your product offerings, you first configure prerequisite components defining the services you are selling, the events your customers will be charged for, the tax codes to apply, and the revenue tracking information. In BRM, these prerequisite components are called pricing setup components. You might need users with specialized skills to configure them.

You use PDC to create these pricing setup components:

• Services: Services define what you base your charges on. For example, the GSM service definition enables you to charge for usage based on a customer's phone number.

• Events: An event is an online action, such as a phone call, an SMS message, or a data download. Data about the event is recorded in BRM. For example, when your customer makes a phone call, an event is generated that contains information about that phone call, such as the date and time the call was made. Events are also recorded for customer actions, such as purchasing a charge offer.

• Ratable usage metrics (RUMs): RUMs specify how to measure events for rating, such as:
  • Duration: The length of an event in units such as seconds or minutes.
  • Occurrence: The number of events generated during a specified period.

• Service-event maps: Service-event maps define which events can be used for a service and which RUMs can be used for each service-event combination. These maps determine which events are available when you define charge and discount offers.

• Balance elements: Balance elements are currency or noncurrency assets, such as U.S. dollars, minutes, or gigabytes. They can also be counters, such as tokens or points, that track the number of dollars spent or minutes talked.
• Deliverables: Deliverables specify when and how much revenue can be recognized from a customer's purchase of your products and services. For example, a textbook's deliverable could specify that 100% of the purchase price is recognized when the book ships from the warehouse.

• Tax codes: Tax codes specify the percentage of tax to apply to a charge, the jurisdiction (state or local), and how to calculate the charge.

• Tax exemption codes: Tax exemption codes specify the percentage by which to reduce the taxes owed for a charge.

You can also define these pricing setup components for additional charging functionality:

• Time Models: Time models are a set of time periods, such as 8pm to midnight and midnight to 6am. You use time models to charge different prices for a service based on the day and time.
• Special day calendars: Special day calendars define a set of dates, such as holidays or weekends. You add special day calendars to time models to charge different prices based on the calendar date.
• Impact categories: Impact categories are a set of event attributes, such as a call's origin and destination location. You use impact categories to apply different rates to events based on their attributes. For example, calls from America to Italy could be charged 10 cents per minute, and calls from America to Canada could be charged 9 cents per minute.
• Zone models: Zone models are a set of time zones, such as Pacific Time or Eastern Time. You use zone models to charge different prices based on your customer's time zone.
• Value maps: Value maps are hierarchical structures of zones and zone values. Each zone contains values that apply to a single event attribute, such as an area code, an IP address, or a broadband bit rate.
• Selectors: A selector is a series of rules that associates the values of event attributes, service attributes, account attributes, or custom rules to a result. Selectors can be applied to charges, discounts, items, taxes, and tax exemptions.

• Policy specifications: Policy specifications define a gradation of QoS based on the subscriber's service usage.

• Extended attribute templates: Extended attributes store additional information used by external systems, such as an enterprise product catalog. When using the XML Pricing Interface, you create extended attribute templates that configure the extended attributes that can be used for pricing components.

• Custom analyzer rules: A custom analyzer rule is a named expression that is used in selector rules to guide a price. For example, you can create custom rules for calls to friends and family on a subscriber's birthday, or to configure supplementary services, such as call forwarding and call blocking.

Prerequisites for Creating Product Offerings

Before you can start creating your product offerings, complete the following tasks:

• Set up your general ledger. Configure how your company records financial transactions for accounting purposes. See "Setting Up Your General Ledger" in BRM Collecting General Ledger Data.

• Define your tax codes, tax exemption codes, and tax suppliers. Define the amount or percentage of taxes to apply to charges, the tax jurisdictions (state or local), and the company or company division responsible for collecting taxes. See "About Calculating Taxes" in BRM Calculating Taxes.

• Define provisioning tags. Define the custom provisioning tasks needed to implement a service on the network, such as creating a voice mailbox. You must define provisioning tags if you use charge offer or discount offer provisioning. See "Creating Provisioning Tags" in BRM Provisioning Services.

• Create your pricing setup components. Configure the prerequisite components that define the services you are selling, the events that customers will be charged for, the tax codes to apply, and the revenue tracking information. See "Creating Pricing Setup Components".

About Changesets

In PDC, you create and modify all setup and pricing components in the context of a changeset. A changeset tracks the changes you make to setup and pricing components. Each user has one or more changesets, which only that user can access.

If you do not have a changeset, PDC automatically creates one for you when you log in. This changeset becomes your active changeset. When you create a setup or pricing component, a draft of the new component is added to your active changeset. When you modify a component, the updated component remains in the changeset in which it was created. If you have multiple changesets, only one can be active, but you can designate a different changeset as your active changeset at any time.

Note:

If no changeset is active after you log into PDC, you must either manually set the desired changeset as active or create a new changeset and make it active before performing any operations in the PDC application.

You submit the changeset to publish the pricing components in a changeset to the BRM database. You must submit an entire changeset; you cannot submit only some components.

You can import components from an XML file into a new or an existing open changeset. The imported components can be immediately submitted for publication.

To share your changesets with other users, you can export the components from a changeset into an XML file. Optionally, you can include all the components referenced by the components in the exported changeset, whether or not the components are part of that changeset.

Making Changes to Your Product Offerings

You can make changes to your product offerings at any time. For example, if you offer a new service, you can create new product offerings to charge for that service.

You can also change charges for existing charge offers, add charge offers to existing bundles, and so forth.

Deleting Charge Offers

You cannot delete a charge offer if any account owns it. To delete a charge offer, cancel it in all accounts.

Logging Changes to Product Offerings

To get notified when product offerings change, BRM can create messages in the cm.pinlog file when product offerings are updated. For information about cm.pinlog and other log files, see "Using Logs to Monitor Components" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.

To log product offering changes, set the fm_rate log_refresh_product entry in the Connection Manager (CM) pin.conf to 1. If this entry is absent or set to 0, BRM does not log changes to the product offerings.

Note:

Charge offers that are used while rating events are cached by rating. The cache is refreshed when a charge offer is modified based on the CM pin.conf entry refresh_product_interval. This entry specifies the time after which the cache needs to be refreshed. If this entry is not specified, the default refresh interval is one hour. When the cache is refreshed and log_refresh_product is enabled, a debug message is created in the cm.pinlog file indicating the /product object POID that was refreshed.

To log product offering changes:

1. Open the CM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf).

2. Set the value for the fm_rate log_refresh_product entry to 1.

   - fm_rate log_refresh_product   1
   

3. Save the file.

4. Stop and restart the CM.

About Product Offering Ownership

During account creation, the customer chooses a package. A package is a set of bundles, each of which, in turn, is a set of charge offers. Therefore, what the customer owns is not a package, but a collection of charge offers and discount offers.

If you create different charge offers for the same service, different customers might use the same service, but pay different charges, based on the charge offers that they own.

For example, you might have two customer accounts that use the same service but have different charge offers, as shown in the following example:

Account 1

Broadband charge offer 1:

• Service: IP

• Cycle forward event: $20

• Usage events: $2

Account 2

Broadband charge offer 2:

• Service: IP

• Cycle forward event: $10

• Usage events: $1

When BRM rates events for these customers, the charges for Account 1 differ from those for Account 2, even though the services and the events being rated are the same types.

When you manage a customer's account, you manage their charge offers. For example, you can change the charge offer status or customize the charge offer's pricing. When you create your product offerings, it is essential to consider how the charge offers will be managed after they have been purchased.