Carry the service context into charging
Charging connects service consumption to the commercial rules around a subscription. The integration needs a dependable relationship between the usage event, subscriber, product and account so the receiving platform can apply the intended treatment.
We engineer the application logic and interfaces around that exchange. The scope starts with your charging environment, its available interfaces and the decisions that customer, product and service workflows need to support.
Define the path from usage to a usable result
Online charging, offline usage processing and converged charging have different interaction patterns. Establish the source of usage, the timing requirements and the meaning of each response before connecting it to a customer-facing process.
We work through subscriber identifiers, product references, event timestamps, units and correlation details. The design should make duplicates, corrections and missing responses identifiable, with clear ownership of rating rules and balance records.
- Usage-event and charging-record integration
- Connections to rating, charging and mediation platforms
- Subscriber, product and account mapping
- Balance and charging-status information for customer channels
Keep charging traceable across service changes
An activation, plan amendment or termination can change how subsequent usage should be handled. Agree when that change becomes effective and how the order workflow receives confirmation from the systems responsible for it.
Roaming adds partner context and usage records that can arrive later or be corrected. We connect those records to the appropriate processing and reconciliation steps, preserving the information needed to investigate a discrepancy.
We define acceptance checks around complete journeys, including delayed events, repeated requests and partial failures. This gives engineering and support teams a shared way to assess the result.
Technical references
Primary references for the concepts discussed here.