Planning a Pricing Plan

Before you create a pricing plan, determine how you want to name, organize, and set up the items that form planning a pricing plan.

The questions in this topic guide you through the decisions you must make to create a pricing plan.

Defining Balance Classes and Balances

Defining Balance Tasks lists the tasks you might perform to configure balance classes and balances in your MATRIXX pricing plans.
Table 1. Defining Balance Tasks
To do this See the Discussion About
Do you want to limit balance validity periods or make them always available for usage? Balance state update components.
Do you want to restrict balance usage to a specific subscriber or device on a subscription product offer? Private balances in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.
If you use periodic balances, how many periods do you keep for history, and how many must you keep in the future to support sessions that might span multiple periods? Sliding windows for period balances and meters in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.
Do you want service providers to control which balances are charged first? Impacting balances by consumption priority.
Do you want group members to share balances? Group-owned balances and meters in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.
Do you want to allow balance rollovers? Rollovers in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.
Do you want to allow a G/L balance to forfeit a currency or asset amount? Balance forfeitures in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.
Do you want to select how a credit floor is adjusted when a balance is canceled or suspended? Configuring balance forfeiture and credit floor adjust.
How do you want to use smart balances to determine balance validity during rating? Smart balances and meters in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.

Setting Up a Naming Scheme

Create an intuitive naming scheme that makes sense across your price catalog—from error codes and service types to price components, product offers, and balances. A good naming practice is important because the catalog creation tasks are typically performed by members of several departments and they use these names to identify the items in My MATRIXX. For example, if one of your products is sold to subscribers as Best Value, then you could prefix the pricing components with Best_ or BV.

Many catalog items are independent and you create them individually before combining them to create the service offerings you offer to subscribers. Therefore, you might want to name items so that they are identified as being compatible. For example, the following catalog items might be used for a data service measured in megabytes (MB) and charged in U. S. dollars.
  • Product Offer — Web with Overage (WwO)
  • Charge — WwO Megabytes
  • Charge — WwO USD
  • Charge — WwO Roaming MB
  • Discount — MB
  • Balance Template — MB
  • Balance Template — USD
  • Meter Template — Daily Usage MB
In this example, the discount, balance templates, and meter template do not include the WwO prefix because they would also be used in other products.

Setting Up Pricing

Setting Up Pricing lists the tasks you might perform to set up pricing in your MATRIXX pricing plans.
Table 2. Setting Up Pricing
To do this See the Discussion About
What type of rates to use? Usage and non-usage rates in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.
How to prioritize rate tables within price components and across product offers? Normalizers.
Do you rate based on attributes of a service, subscriber, or device? If so, you must create normalizers that use the attributes as normalization values. Normalizer templates.
For quantity based rates, will you rate the entire event with one parameter value or have the event distributed across multiple parameter values? Rating formula options.
Do you want to create one complex normalizer decision table that bases results on multiple normalizer parameters, or do you want to create separate decision tables, one for each normalizer parameter? Creating a decision table.
Do you want to define tiers for closed user group normalizers? Adding a field to a pricing plan.
Do you want to base rating on quantity types? Field definitions.
Do you want to include a single rate table or multiple rate tables on grant price components? Grants.
Do you want to trigger a grant when balance or meter thresholds are crossed? Balance-threshold based pricing in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.
How to offer discounts? As percentages or absolute amounts? Discounts.
Do you want to discount events based on subscriber usage or current charges? Discounts.
Do you want to configure eligibility requirements and exclusions to determine catalog item eligibility? Eligibility.
Decide what to do if a subscriber's balance cannot cover the cost of the service. Final unit indication.
Do you want subscribers to re-establish cycle processing after a failure? Grace period profiles.
How to prioritize product offers when multiple apply? By a set priority or dynamically, as determined by conditions that exist during rating? Calculating offer priority during rating in MATRIXX Pricing and Rating.
Do you want to calculate product offer priority using offer priority generators? Offer priority generators.
If your MATRIXX environment will accept rating messages from both Diameter and 5G networks, do you want to create virtual fields to avoid creating multiple pricing configurations? Using virtual fields.
Do you want to define variables in your pricing plan using filters? Filters.

Setting Up Policies

Policy configuration components are used by MATRIXX Charging Application and MATRIXX Policy Application for charging and rating. Policy configuration components that you can create in the sub-interfaces of this interface include policy session mappings, Sy policy, Sy policy counters, Sy policy profiles, Sy policy templates, Gx event triggers, Gx event trigger groups, Gx policy, Gx policy profiles, Gx QoS profiles, and Gx static or dynamic PCC rules. For policy configuration options and tasks, see the discussion about policy configuration.