Implementing Rating and Charging of Usage of a Service

Now that the provider contract for CutAbove has been created in Solution Quotation in Subscription Order Management (SOM) and replicated to SAP Convergent Charging, the charge plans, and charges for usage fees that were covered in the previous unit are assigned to the provider contract in the SAP Convergent Charging view of the provider contract.

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Karen, O2C Company’s billing specialist, is responsible for monitoring the rating and charging process in Converging Charging.

SAP Convergent Charging allows the service provider to charge for the services based on time and service usage. The system supports flexible price models for both recurring fees and usage fees and even allows the modeling of dependencies between these different fee types.

SAP Convergent Charging allows price calculation logics to be reused for several services, so that redundancies are minimized. With SAP Subscription Order Management (SAP SOM), it offers optional service components, that customers can choose to subscribe to as add-ons for their current subscriptions.

Let’s remind ourselves of the cloud selection service that O2C offers to their customers.

• The O2C Company offers cloud infrastructure to their customer.
• The product Cloud Selection Service is a subscription and is paid monthly.
• The monthly fee depends on the selected service level agreement
• Pay-as-you-go, Silver, Gold, Platinum.
• There is an activation Fee.
• The product has a minimum duration for the subscription of 24 months.

The company CutAbove is a large company that deals with videos in the cloud. The company receives the cloud platform and physical infrastructure for their work from the O2C Company.

The IT department of the company decides to order the product "Cloud Selection Service" with the service level platinum.

Before you learn the Convergent Charging process, it is important that you understand some definitions.

Pricing

Pricing is the term describing the process of creating the logic that calculates the prices to be charged for the various services to the customers. The logic is created in so called "price plans" which are stored in so called "charges".

Rating

Rating is the term which describes the process of actually calculating what the usage of a certain service costs, for instance, how much has to be paid.

Charging

Charging is the term which describes the process of determining the account of the customer/person, who is paying for the service consumption. The charging logic is stored in the so called "charging plan", a decision-tree-based structure similar to price plans.

Charge

Charges contain a unique price determination logic described as a tree structure called a Price Plan. It also contains a dedicated set of charging rules organized as a tree-structured Charging Plan. Charges generate an amount that must be used to either debit or credit a client or partner. Moreover, it can be either a master or dependent charge. Finally, it is included in a comprehensive charge plan.

Each charge contains a Price Plan and a Charging Plan.

• The charging plan determines the account to debit or credit.
• The price plan represents the business logic used to compute an amount. It is made up of rating components.

Users configure the rating components into a "Decision Tree" that SAP CC Core Server uses to determine the price for a particular usage, recurring, or one-shot rate.

Convergent Charging is connected to three systems. The following numbered list correlates with the preceding graphic.

1. Subscription Order Management (SOM):

   SOM provides the price conditions (for recurring fees) and the provider contracts. One-time fees (for example, activation fees) are sent direct from SOM to SAP Convergent Invoicing. Recurring fees can be calculated either in Convergent Invoicing based on billing plans or in Convergent Charging based on charge plans.

2. Convergent Mediation:

   The mediation engine is responsible for transforming the data sent by the network infrastructure into records which are handled and processed by the rating engine. These records must contain all data necessary for rating and charging:

   • User ID pointing to the correct (technical) user using the service.
   • Service ID pointing to the correct service which was used.
   • Consumption date in the right common format.
   • Any user-defined properties which are necessary for the rating and charging process.
3. Convergent Invoicing:

   Convergent Invoicing receives the usage data with a price and assigned to a specific customer account.

   Convergent Charging uses Recurring Charges and Usage Charges for the creation of subscription-related fees.

An access object will only be created if the charge contains a usage rate. Charges with only recurring rates do not have an access object.

• The UserID is a unique identifier of the subscriber account/provider contract.
• The ServiceID is a unique technical identifier of the service (charge).
• The access is the combination of UserID and Service ID.
• The usage Events can be assigned to the usage charge with help of the access.

A Provider Contract is made up of at least one or more contract items. Each contract item corresponds to a Charge Plan which includes the charges. How many Contract Items (or Charge Plans) are activated inside a Provider Contract is defined in the Product Model and the contained Cross Catalog Mapping in SOM.