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sebastien_martin
Employee
Employee
May 2019

We’re delighted to announce the general availability of SAP Convergent Charging 5.0 Support Package 4 (SP 4). With SP 4, we continue our UX renovation to provide a best-in-class, consistent, and modern user experience to our customers through the adoption of the SAP Fiori user experience design. We also continue to enhance the functionalities of our high-performance and scalable charging platform while making it easier to operate and finally to make our existing customers happy.

This blog provides you with the latest and greatest SP 4 highlights of our charging platform, part of the SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (BRIM) suite.




User Experience


Edition of Mapping Table Classes


It is now possible to edit a mapping table class from the Manage Mapping Table Classes Fiori app. The editing mode allows pricing specialists to modify the description, the input and output columns – provided the table class is not already referenced by a released mapping table – as well as additional information of an existing mapping table class.


Edition of Mapping Table Rows


This new release comes with a bunch of new features that help pricing specialists maintain mapping table rows. It is now possible to edit, copy, and delete the mapping table rows directly from the Manage Mapping Tables Fiori app. In addition, the import feature has been improved. You no longer need to import a full data set that replaces the existing one, but you can instead load a file with a partial data set and merge its content with the existing mapping table data.


Contextual Creation of Catalog


A pricing catalog can now be created while creating a new mapping table class from the Manage Mapping Table Classes Fiori app.

Product Documentation


The product documentation of SAP Convergent Charging available on help.sap.com has been converted to SAP’s standard format for a consistent and modern user experience across SAP products.




Price Plan Enhancements


Agreement Tables


Catalog tables (mapping and range tables) are enhanced with a new attribute to store an agreement identifier. In Subscription Order Management, agreement tables are defined within a master agreement to store specific conditions like prices, discounts, etc. applying to one or several customers. Agreement tables are replicated into SAP Convergent Charging as catalog tables with the agreement identifier filled in.

4-4-5 Calendar


In this release, a new calendar type called 4-4-5 calendar, is introduced to define one-time and recurring fees. The 4-4-5 calendar structure consists of 4 quarters of 13 weeks each grouped into two 4-week months and one 5-week month.

"Not equal" Operator


A new comparison operator is added to some logic components available in the Core Tool to build price plans, allowances, etc. You can now use the "Not Equal" operator to compare two number properties.




Operations and Integration


System Maintenance


Restarting the SAP CC Core Server to perform maintenance operations – e.g. to upgrade to a new version or to apply a patch – can be a long and resource-consuming operation since every SAP CC Core Server instance must make sure that its memory cache is always up-to-date by loading data from the database. A new maintenance mode has been introduced to optimize this data loading process and allows system administrators to have a better control of the platform. Therefore, using the SAP CC Cockpit, system administrators can decide to put some instances on standby. In that case, those instances are smoothly excluded from the rating process. The system administrator can then perform maintenance operations and restart instances safely. Meanwhile, to preserve even more database resources, when an instance restarts, it can directly transfer its cache data to the remaining instances through the network instead of requesting the remaining instances to load cache data from the database.


Maintenance of Range Sets via Web Services


It is now possible to update a catalog range table such as adding, modifying or removing range sets via new Web Service operations, without the need of providing the full content of the table.




More Information


SAP Convergent Charging 5.0 SP 4 has been released to customers on May 24th, 2019 and is available on the SAP Software Download Center.

For more information on SAP Convergent Charging 5.0 SP 4, check out the following links: