About rerating

Business operation

During the production operation phase, as application administrator you may need to rerate data when exceptional mistakes or errors occur in price plans, translation tables, and other data objects, resulting in incorrect transactions stored in the third-party billing system. Core Tool allows rerating all service usage events occurred within a default period of 70 days (*) preceding the current date.

(*) The period may be different in your SAP CC system. Get the current value of the COUNTER_SNAPSHOT_COUNT system parameter with the Admin+ user interface. Refer to the SAP CC Configuration Guide for more information about the implementation of the rerating services in your system landscape.

Example

Pricing errors can lead to erroneous rating calculations. For example, this situation can arise from an incorrect price plan, incorrect content in translation tables, or incorrect use of translation tables or pricing macros. This results in incorrect transactions stored in the third-party billing system.

Authorization

You must have the Administrator role in your SAP CC user profile.

Rerating process

You initialize (and perform) the rerating process according to the following variants and options:

In an integrated SAP Solution scenario, :

With SAP CC BART Server: The BART Server system of SAP CC performs this process to rerate subscriptions and provider contracts in batch. You trigger this process from SAP CC Core Tool. BART Server works with SAP CC Core Server that works with SAP Convergent Invoicing in SAP ERP/FI/CA.
With SAP Convergent Invoicing (in SAP ERP/FI-CA) with consumption item management: SAP CI in the SAP ERP system performs the rerating process. You can however trigger the rerating operations with the SAP CC Core Tool user interface or with SAP CI. The rerating process only rerates provider contracts via the Web Services technical interface but does not rerate subscriptions.

In another scenario, SAP CC BART Server performs the rerating process and SAP CC Core Server must be interfaced with a third-party billing system. The implementation includes Java developments.

Note: During the installation, you must select the configuration file of the SAP CC Core Server system to choose one of these options. For more information, refer to the SAP CC Configuration Guide (see help resources).

Rerating process managed by BART Server

The rerating process consists of nine steps performed by:

The Core Server system (step 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9)
The BART Server system (step 8)
The external billing system (step 5)

The steps are the following:

Selecting the provider contracts which must be rerated according to a search filter (for example, provider contract, translation table). If a parent contract or a linked contract is selected, all the collection linked contracts and their parent contract are included in this selection.
Sending the selected provider contracts to the BART Server system.
Synchronizing the bulkloaders to make sure that the billable items are sent to the external billing system before the beginning of the rerating operation.
Checking that the state of the provider contracts can be restored from the counter snapshots. If the state of a a provider contract cannot be restored, the provider contract cannot be rerated and is erroneous.
Checking that the billable items can be reversed at a specified date, or proposing another date after the specified date if the billable items have already been billed.
Restoring the selected provider contracts to the state they had at the time of the specified date.
Sending the request to the external billing system for reversing the billable items generated by the selected provider contracts during the rerating period.
Rating the usage events related to each provider contract.
Sending the rerated billable items to the external billing system.

When a translation table or a set of provider contracts is rerated, the related provider contracts are first restored, and then rerated by batch rating groups. The rerating process is completed when all the provider contracts have been successfully rerated.

Note:

At step 8, the provider contracts are grouped by batch rating groups.
The rerating process can only be stopped during step 6. Because the rerating process rates the batch rating groups of provider contracts, one after another, the rerating process stops after the current batch rating group is rerated.
The rerating process is only available if the SAP Convergent Charging solution is configured to work together with SAP Convergent Invoicing. This process can be adapted to third party billing systems which are different from SAP Convergent Invoicing, but this configuration requires specific developments. For further information, please refer to your SAP consultants.
For further information about the BART Server and the BART Tool components, refer to help resources.

Rerating process for SAP ERP/FI-CA

You can initialize the rerating process for SAP ERP/FI-CA by creating a rerating operation from the SAP CC Core Tool user interface. This operation enables SAP CC Core Server to send a list of provider contracts to SAP ERP/FI-CA for rerating purposes. When the operation is successfully completed, a message displays the rerating session identifier; otherwise, a message warns you that an error has occurred during the communication with the server.

For more information about the rerating process, refer to the product documentation of SAP Convergent Invoicing (SAP CI) in SAP ERP/FI-CA.