Managing Provider Contract (incl. Access)

Each IT Department is represented by one account/business partner in the SAP SOM system and already has a provider contract.

The product that the IT Department is using is the Cloud selection service. The product includes a subscription and must be paid monthly. The monthly fee depends on the selected service level agreement.

The master data for the IT Department has been replicated after creation in SOM to the Convergent Charging system.

A Provider Contract is a long-term agreement between a service provider and a customer based on specific terms. Those terms have been negotiated beforehand to define how and when the customer will be charged. This means that the provider contract is a link between a customer (represented by a subscriber account in SAP Convergent Charging) and one or many services the customer has subscribed to.

When the provider contract is viewed in the core tool, there are four tabs available:

1. Definition
2. Counters
3. Additional Information
4. Rerating State

The Definition tab shows the basic information about the contract:

• The service provider / catalog this contract belongs to.
• The subscriber account this contract belongs to.
• If the contract is linked to any other provider contract, the ID of the linked contract is shown.
  Note

  Linked contracts are not covered in this training
• The batch rating group the contract belongs to.

  Batch rating groups are only important when you execute batch rating with the "batch acquisition and rating toolset" (BART). As BART is deprecated and all batch rating operations are controlled by SAP Convergent Invoicing, the information is usually not important anymore.

• The operational status.

  The operational status of a contract can change over time. The following states are possible:

  • Active:

    The provider contract is fully operational.

  • Locked:

    The provider contract is temporarily locked. SAP Convergent Charging processes are not available for this contract.

  • Closed:

    The provider contract is deactivated.

• The operational status of a contract can change over time. The following states are possible:
  • Active:

    The provider contract is fully operational.

  • Locked:

    The provider contract is temporarily locked. SAP Convergent Charging processes are not available for this contract.

  • Closed:

    The provider contract is deactivated.

The following graphic shows which state transitions are possible. As you may notice a contract that has entered the "closed" state cannot be set to "active" anymore.

Counters are an important concept in SAP Convergent Charging. As the term implies, they can be used to count things you want to track. This can be the number of minutes a customer has used a shared car or the number of CPU hours used of a service within a billing period. The value of a counter can be shared between contract items, if they are configured with the same namespace. This way you can have one contract item increase the counter value whenever the customer uses a CPU (and reset it at the end of each billing cycle), while a different contract item reads the current value to discount the base fee based on the CPU usage. Whether a counter is shared or not shared is configured in the charge plan, refill plan or monitoring plan referenced by the contract item. The tab on the contract level only shows the result of this configuration.

Sharing counter values across provider contracts is also possible, if these contracts belong to the same subscriber account. These sharing mechanics are not covered in this course in further detail.

Many objects in SAP Convergent Charging offer tabs with additional information. This additional information is stored as a list of key-value-pairs, where values of the data types string, number and date are available. This additional information cannot be used as part of the price calculation logic. It is only there for your information.

The last tab called Rerating State shows information controlling the rerating process. You will not cover this process in detail in this course, but a brief introduction is given. The main idea of this process is to provide an option to repeat the calculation of prices. This can be necessary when prices have been found to be wrong, or because the validity of price changes have not been maintained correctly. These mistakes can result in wrong invoices, which in turn might lead to customer complaints. Especially in business-to-business scenarios companies insist to be given corrected invoices, which makes this feature valuable. During rerating SAP Convergent Charging locks the contract that it is processing for regular rating operations, so that regular rating operations do not interfere with rerating operations. Each lock is associated with a so called Rerating Lock Code. The tab shows both the current and the last rerating lock code used.

Each contract can have several contract items. In this training, you need to cover a few more topics first, before you can cover contract items in more detail, so be patient for now.

When new business partners, contract accounts and provider contracts are created, they are sent to SAP Convergent Charging. SAP Subscription Order Management only replicates those business partners and contract accounts that are referenced by a provider contract. Let’s see how this works.

This graphic provides an overview of the distribution of the business partner, contract account and provider contract.

The business partner is only replicated when the first provider contract is created.

The contract account is created as a shared object used by both SAP Subscription Order Management and FI-CA, so no replication between these two solution components is necessary. SAP Convergent Charging, however, will receive the contract account as soon as the business partner was received successfully.

The provider contract is only replicated to SAP Convergent Charging when it was successfully created in FI-CA. If the replication towards SAP Convergent Charging fails, a rollback is executed in FI-CA. This way the contract is either replicated successfully to both systems (FI-CA and SAP Convergent Charging) or to none.