Analyzing the Allowance Integration between SAP Subscription Order Management and SAP Convergent Charging

Now that we know about the building blocks of allowances at design time, we can look at how allowances are managed across the systems of a Billing Revenue and Innovation Management solution.

SAP Convergent Charging provides a lot of flexibility to create allowances. When integrated with SAP Subscription Order Management, however, there is a specific architecture that you need to follow when you want to allow SAP Subscription Order Management to manage allowances for the contracts it manages. This standard architecture puts some additional constraints on the flexibility offered by SAP Convergent Charging, but at the same time provides an integrated process to manage allowances easily between SAP Subscription Order Management and SAP Convergent Charging. Let’s check what these guidelines look like.

Any allowance that is supposed to be offered to customers of a specific product in SAP Subscription Order Management, needs to be defined in advance as a so-called "Allowance Definition Group". Let’s consider our business example to understand what this means.

In the example, the company O2C wants to offer three different sizes of allowances. Each type has a different initial value and bonus amount that is granted. Customers of the O2C company cannot purchase any freely defined allowance (where the customer freely decides with how much initial amount and bonus amount the allowance is initialized with), but must choose from the given list the O2C company provides as part of its offer.

SAP Subscription Order Management manages such sets of different allowance variants as Allowance Definition Groups, and assigns them to the products that customer can subscribe to. The allowances created for the subscription of a specific product can be limited that way to the allowance configurations listed in the allowance group.

In SAP Convergent Charging these different allowance configurations are stored in special kinds of mapping tables. The following figure shows a mapping table MT_T00_CLOUD_ALLOW_DEF_V01 along with its mapping table class, that contains the allowance configurations the O2C company wants to offer to its customers.

As you can see, all properties of the allowances are managed as output columns. When creating the Allowance Definition Group, SAP Subscription Order Management reads these columns and displays the allowances with all its properties on its screens. The data is read from the tables and assigned to products the customer can subscribe to in the Cross-Catalog Mapping.

The mapping table which stores the allowance definition data must be recognizable by SAP Subscription Order Management as such a table. Therefore, mapping table classes and mapping tables containing allowance definition data must contain the following:

1. One input column of type string with the name ALLOW_DEF_ID (this column must contain the identifier of the allowance definition). One output column of type string and the name ALLOW_DEF_DESC.
2. Some other main output columns that depend on your business case: BucketQuantity, Validity, and so on.

An additional information item of type string, named SAP_DATA_TYPE is set to the value AllowanceDefinition.

Allowances can be created by SAP Subscription Order Management automatically when a contract is created or changed. During that process SAP Subscription Order Management creates a chargeable item to SAP Convergent Charging for rating, which is supposed to trigger the allowance creation. The chargeable item always references a specific chargeable item class called "ALLO". This class has a well-defined format and must have the following:

1. A custom property of type string, that is called ALLOW_DEF_ID. The value of that property in the chargeable item must correspond to an entry in the column ALLOW_DEF_ID of the allowance definition mapping table.
2. A custom property of type date, that is called ALLOW_START_DATE. The value of that property in the chargeable item must contain the date at which the allowance is supposed to become valid.

All these fields are provided by the interface component Data for Creating an Allowance that must be enabled for the corresponding consumption item class in SAP Convergent Invoicing.

With the allowance data provided in a table, and a chargeable item referencing an entry from that table with its property "ALLOW_DEF_ID", we can tackle the charge and charge plan creation process. Let’s examine the general sequence of steps we must execute so that an allowance can be created:

1. Read the allowance details from the allowance definition table with the ALLOW_DEF_ID provided in the chargeable item.
2. Create the new allowance using the allowance plan of your choice.

In the exercises, the charge CHG_G_00_CLOUD_CREATION_V01 contains a usage rate sensitive to chargeable items of the chargeable item class "ALLO". One of the steps in the charge is to check a mapping table stated in the parameter CLOUD_ALLOW_DEF_TABLE and use the value in the chargeable item field ALLOW_DEF_ID as the search key.

In case no definition is found, the rating process needs to be canceled with an error message (Access Denied). When an allowance definition was found, the return values can be used to create the allowance in the next step with the corresponding operator component.

It is possible in SAP Convergent Charging to create allowances freely without using data read from an allowance definition table. This, however, would prevent SAP Subscription Order Management from managing these allowances and displaying the data properly.

When you create the charge plan by adding the charge to it as a charge plan item, you need to pay special attention to the definition of the associated service identifier. Service identifiers to create allowances must start with the prefix ALLOW_ followed by any other text of up to six characters. A common practice is to choose ALLOW_CREATE as the service identifier.