Discovering Acquisition, Rating, and Charging Process Steps

The Video Cutting company has started to use the cloud platform. Usage records have been created. The O2C Company is about to rate and charge the usage based on the selected product option.

Customer master and contract data are provisioned from the customer and contract system into SAP Convergent Charging. Usage data is sent from the event metering system (usually with the help of a Mediation system) into SAP Convergent Charging for rating and pricing. Rated usage data is sent to the downstream Billing System in the required format from SAP Convergent Charging.

SAP Convergent Charging receives input from the customer, the contract system, and the event metering system.

The customer and the contract system provide:

• The price conditions (for recurring fees).
• The provider contracts.

The event metering system provides usage data. 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.

Output to the Billing System. The usage data with a price and assigned to a specific customer account.

The following steps show how to create consumption items:

1. Creation of the chargeable item on the SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute side. The item is sent to SAP Convergent Charging for acquisition purposes.
2. Acquisition of the item by SAP Convergent Charging. SAP Convergent Charging generates the chargeable item only. The acquisition of chargeable items can be done through the Java APIs or using the IEC (a new action for acquisition). Basically, this process executes the guiding part of the charging process (retrieving the contract). It generates chargeable items enriched with contract information Loading in Convergent Invoicing of the corresponding consumption item flagged as not charged.
   Note

   Charging in Charging Plan means the assignment of the External account.
3. Rating in Price plan, update of Counter.
4. SAP Convergent Charging processes the chargeable items and generates the corresponding charged items.
5. Charged Items are mapped to billable items with charged item mapping.
6. Loading in SAP Convergent Invoicing of the corresponding billable items and rated consumption items.