HighDeal Processing Flow

Answer

Highdeal is an integral part of the overall solution in the SaaS back office processing support.? The flow of information from the creation of the entitlement to the billing for that entitlement is automated to make it easier to accurately process customer and subscription information.? Outlined below is a diagram which shows the integration of Highdeal with other modules.? The flow of data in green facilitates the common creation of customer and subscription data from the DSW SQO ordering system, through the Customer Hub to Highdeal.


The process for Highdeal is broken into three major steps.

Prior to on boarding to Highdeal there is a configuration step.? In that step we perform the following activities:

1.? A review of the business requirements is made to determine the behavior that the offering needs to exhibit with each kind of entitlement.? In this step we define

2.? The pricing plan for each type of entitlement

3.? Configure the parts to indicate that it will pass information to Highdeal from the customer hub

4.? Define the structure of the usage records that will be sent to Highdeal by the offering

5.? Coordinate with DSW SAP to create and test the upload file.

6.? Test all components of the system to make sure that the rating is being performed correctly

7.? Train the offering on the use of Highdeal

8.? Sign a DoU clearly stating the requirements for operation

Once the system is moved to production the Customer Hub will feed the Customer and Subscription data to Highdeal on an ongoing basis.? This is an automatic feed of the data as the Customer Hub is updated with a provisioning complete status.? From that feed Highdeal has the customer, subscription and access records automatically created.? Currently the user updates the system with the proper contract pricing information.? This will become an automatic update in the future.

On a monthly basis the Highdeal system ingests usage records from the offering to process overage and metered billing information.? If Highdeal is generating the subscription charges it will automatically create a recurring monthly (or other frequency) transaction record to cause that billing to take place as well.

Highdeal works with four primary objects.? They are:

1.? Party Record:? Represents the customer entity.

2.? Account Record:? Represents the account on which transactions are aggregated.? It is also the billing relationship between the account holder and a service provider.

3.? Subscription Record:? A subscription is an offer that is a customer is entitled to as part of a contract.? The subscription may represent a recurring charge for that service, a one time charge, or a charge that is based on usage of the service.

4.? Access Record:? The user access specifies the identifier under which a customer consumes a product or service.? This identifier enables the rating engine to identify the subscription and the charge within it for usage rating purposes.

The calculation of the amount to be charged by Highdeal for any particular entitlement is controlled by the product, offer, and charge items.? These functions relate individual entitlements with a pricing plan which will calculate the amount to charge for each subscription.? Each product is associated with an offering and each offering is then associated with a charge.? The charge uses a pricing plan to perform the actual calculation for each subscription.? The system may utilize either a price table or the contract price from the original order to find the rate to charge a customer.? The pricing plans themselves may be simplistic to complex in nature.

Some of the potential pricing plans include but are not limited to:

• Simple price times quantity plans
• Tiered pricing of services; both all tiers where the price is based on the highest level of usage attained and step tier where the price is based on usage that matches each individual tier level.
• Combination of two or more metrics to calculate a single price.
• Average usage calculations including both fixed time periods and rolling averages.? Current calculations include 3, 6, 9, and 12 month rolling averages and 3, 6, and 12 month fixed period overages.
• Pricing based on grouping of usage information into pricing clip levels.? For example, usage may be reported in bytes but billed in kilobytes or reported in terms of dollars and billed by units of $10,000.

As shown above the monthly process that is followed entails the transfer of usage information from the offering to Highdeal.? Once they are received on the Highdeal server they are checked for completeness and then placed in a staging area for ingestion by the system.? The BART (Batch Acquisition and Rating Tool) component of Highdeal performs edit checks on the data and writes logs indicating which transactions were processed, filtered out of the process, or were in error.? Once acquired into the BART system the user requests a rating of all transactions and corrects any errors that may exist.? Finally the user has the opportunity to run proforma passes of the billing they will perform.? The output may be examined and corrections, if any, may be made prior to sending the billing upload to SAP for invoicing.? At the point that the user is comfortable with the billing run they will request that the final Invoice update be generated and sent to SAP by the system.