SAP Convergent Charging uses patented decision tree technology [DO TREE (Decision Operation Tree)]
Decision tree technology allows customer to create and executive in real time new an innovative pricing, discount, commission, loyalty points, charges structures for any kind of services.
Decision tree technology has the following significant advantages:
- Direct Graphical Representation: Decision trees lend themselves naturally to a clear and easy-to-understand graphical representation. It allows non technical business manager easily view and manipulate pricing structures.
- Deterministic and Reliable: It means that they yield predictable, reliable results.
- Automatic Verification: SAP Convergent Charging can automatically verify the integrity of offer structures, ensuring that each possible combination of inputs yields a result and that the structure is internally consistent and correctly connected to other elements.
SAP Convergent Charging is a convergent platform that allows customer to manage hybrid prepaid and postpaid accounts.
SAP Convergent Charging includes full support for managing complex network of partner relationships and has patented its technology in this area. It means to use the same graphical interface for building:
- Royalty cost structures
- fixed or transactions costs
- Commissions
- Sponsorship arrangements where one third party pays some or all of the costs of a transactions
Convergent charging and billing (also known as convergent charging, converged charging and convergent billing), is a solution in the telecommunications industry that enables common management of all users and all services for operators.It includes convergence of payment methods like prepaid and postpaid, as well as access methods and services like fixed telephony, mobile telephony, broadband and TV.
A converged charging system is described as having the ability to control services and manage balances in real-time. This includes, for example, authenticating the subscriber and checking the account balance before service delivery to the end user. A converged charging system can also notify users when the account balance threshold set by the operator is reached, or terminate service connectivity when real-time charging indicates that credit has been depleted. This real-time capability can be used to deliver promotions and notifications to service users to stimulate usage.
In short, SAP CC is all about Rating and Charging.
Rating refers to all the calculation mechanism of coming up with the total bill amount.
While, Charging refers to which account that will be charged against for a particular customer. For example, other than your mobile phone, you might also subscribe to a supplementary line, or you have another internet broadband account with the same company. Notice that they come in with separate bills and have different account id or account number! The Charging process will know which services you use and selects the correct account to charge you with.
These two terms are heavily used in all the SAP CC documentations.
This is how it looks like apparently,
Once the installation is done, the sapmmc console is used to start the SAP CC server instances.
SAP CC comes with a tool that provides the interface for configuration. The tool is called Core Tool and in a standard installation, it is saved in the directory below.
Just double click on the core_tool.bat & get it done 🙂
There is a big difference in architecture here compared to the normal SAP configuration. If you are familiar with SAP implementation guide on transaction SPRO, and have accessed the SAP GUI before, you will notice that multiple users can gain access to the SAP system and one time and multiple configuration can be done by different user at the same time.
In SAP CC, it will be different. One user only at a time. And the whole configuration interface will not look like SPRO. In fact, there is no comparison in SAP CC to SAP ECC or SAP CRM configuration at all.
SAP CC (SPRO) Core Tool looks like,