Rate management manual

THE MANUAL ON THE RATE MANAGEMENT IS CURRENTLY BEING WRITTEN AND MAY NOT BE COMPLETE OR 100% UP TO DATE YET. PLEASE EXCUSE OUR DUST.

LCR1 is a least cost routing report where the system displays one vendor (or customer) Rate plan per a row. You may use Vendor, as well as Customer Rate plans to see how Customer rates stand against Vendor rates. Rows with Customer Rate plans are highlighted with a configured color at the same time.

Available grouping by areas can make the report much more compact and legible - different LCR groups are separated by red lines. Codes will be grouped only if all rates for all vendors are same for all codes, otherwise you will have several code groups per each area.

The report can be displayed right in the web interface or exported as a .csv, .xlsx file.

In order to create a new LCR report click on the button LCR report. This will open the LCR options window where you should fill out the following fields:

• Rate plans to compare - choose Rate plans from the drop-down table. If blank - all enabled Rate plans will be compared.
• Rate plan slices to compare - choose Rate plan slices from the drop-down table. If blank - all enabled Rate plans will be compared.
• Rate plan groups to compare - choose Rate plan groups from the drop-down table. If blank - all enabled Rate plans will be compared.
• Areas to match to - stats area set or Code deck areas to match with areas in LCR.
• Code deck for area names - choose a Code deck from which the system will take area names for analysed prefixes. Vendors do have different sets of codes and areas. The chosen Code deck will serve as a master set of area names to show per each code.
• Areas to compare - you may choose several areas from the Code deck for area names, if empty - all areas will be compared. Areas and codes below are combined.
• Codes to compare - comma-separated list of codes to compare (all longer codes are included). If empty - all codes will be compared.
• Group by areas - group codes with same rates and other parameters. Most often this will result in grouping by areas, but if codes for the same areas are different in compared Rate plans, one area may have several code groups.
• Export format - choose the format of the generated report.
• Rates to compare - choose on of the following options:
• Currently active in each Rate plan - compares only currently active rates from the chosen Rate plans.
• Latest active or future in each Rate plan - compares the latest active or future rates from the chosen Rate plans.
• All active and future in each Rate plan - compares all active and future rates from the chosen Rate plans.
• Compare batches, not Rate plans - the system compares only the rates contained in batches set in the next field Compared batches.
• Compared batches - enter a comma-separated batches list. Active only if the Compare batches, not Rate plans option is chosen in the previous field.
• Ignore disabled records - check if you need to ignore disabled records. Active only if the Compare batches, not Rate plans option is chosen in the Rates to compare field.
• Max rate to include - maximum rate in System currency that will be considered for LCR.
• Max priority level - maximum number of Rate plans shown per each LCR group.
• Highlight customer plans - choose a colour to highlight rows with Customer Rate plans.
• Include area IDs - add area IDs to area names for Customer rate plans and Code deck master areas in files.

When you make comparison by areas you should take into account that comparison by codes may provide more accurate results, as codes in the Code deck and in the Vendor rate sheet may not match for the same area.

Clicking on the OK button start generating the LCR report. If you have chosen the export format as Web table then the report will be displayed right in the LCR1 table with the following columns:

• Row ID - internal ID of the rate record.
• Import batches - import batch of the rate.
• Status - display status of the rate, enabled or disabled.
• Code in Rate plan - code from the Rate plan which covers the corresponding Code LCR group.
• Code LCR group - an LCR group is a set of rates for exactly the same code. If such a code is not found in a Rate plan, the rate for the shorter code is taken.
• Codes count - number of codes in the LCR group (may be > 1 if report is grouped by areas).
• Area name in Rate plan - area name in the Rate plan for the current row rate.
• Area name in master Code deck - area name in the Code deck chosen as a reference for area names.
• Generated price - price displayed in the report after Customer rates generating by means of the Generate Customer rates button.
• Generated diff - difference between the generated price and the current row rate.
• Rate sys currency - Vendor (or Customer) Rate plan rate converted to the system currency.
• Rate diff with pr 1 - rate difference between the priority 1 rate and the current row rate.
• Billing increm. - billing increment of the rate.
• Priority - priority of the current row rate.
• Rate plan - a Rate plan holding the rate.
• Plan type - Rate plan type: Customer or Vendor.
• State - state of the rate.
• Active from, GMT - date/time in GMT the rate active from.
• Active till, GMT - date/time in GMT the rate active till.
• Processing policy 5g - displays a 5g policy assigned to this rate.
• Processing policy ext - displays a policy used for this rate during export to an external billing system.

Besides standard functions of LCR report this tool has extended features. It allows you to generate Customer rates on basis of Vendor rates and then edit them in the Generated rate edit module. When you click the Generate Customer rates button the floating window opens, where you can setup the parameters of generation:

• Rate aggregation method, priority 1,2,3 - choose one base vendor rate out of possible several for each Code deck area.
• Multiply rate by, priority 1,2,3 - multiply the base rate by this coefficient.
• Traffic share of priority 1,2,3 route, % - estimated share of traffic to the route with this priority, in %.
• Round final rates to - round final rates to this many digits after the dot.
• Rounding method - choose one of the available rounding methods.

After clicking OK the system fill up the Generated price and Generated diff columns for each area. Now you can review them right in the LCR report and then move to the Generated rate edit using the Move to Generated rate edit button.

One more very helpful additional feature here is possibility to analyse Vendor rates comparing them with your current area statistics. You should use one of the stats area set in the Areas to match to option for this purpose. In the Interval strip you can choose the interval for which to display statistics. In order to submit a request for statistical data please click on the Stats button of the top menu. In this case the report is extended by additional fields which allows you to analyse the loaded rates:

• Area name in statistics - area name in statistics collected from CDRs. The following stats fields display statistics for this area.
• Min stats - total amount of minutes processed for the area.
• Price/min stats - average price calculated from the stats for the area.
• Price/min diff - difference between the average price and the current row rate.
• Price/min diff,% - difference between the average price and the current row rate displayed in %.
• Cost/min stats - average cost calculated from the stats for the area.
• Cost/min diff - difference between the average cost and the current row rate.
• Cost min diff,% - difference between the average cost and the current row rate displayed in %.

The LCR2 report is similar to the LCR1 but presented in another fashion. It has more compact view where you get top 10 Vendor (or Customer) Rate plans per a row. Each row displays rates for a specific Code in LCR group or for a certain Area name in master Code deck depends on the checked/unchecked flag Group by areas in the LCR report options window.

By default you can see the following fields for each Rate plan in a report record:

• Codes X - area code of a Rate plan with priority X.
• Rate X sys currency - rate with priority X within the LCR group, converted to the system currency.
• Rate delta X - delta between the rate with priority X and the rate with priority 1.
• Increm. X - billing increment of a Rate plan with priority X.
• Rate plan X - Rate plan with priority X.
• Rate IDs X - internal rate IDs of the rate record with priority X. For Customer rates the code ID from the Code deck is added.
• Batches X - import batches (Vendor rates) or change batches (Customer rates) of the rate with priority X.

But you can make the report more compact by excluding optional columns using the corresponding options in the LCR report window:

If you generated Customer rates in the LCR1 or LCR2 module and then clicked on the button Move to Generated rate edit, you will get the generated Customer rates in this table for price editing. When you are done with adjusting of the Generated price you can use the Move to Change deck button in order to move all the prepared rates to the Change deck for further editing and importing to the main rate table.

The Push/target report allows you to analyse partners push/target lists against your statistics from CDRs.

At first, you should import a push/target list to 5gVision using the Rate import screen. If you have a separate push/target file, you just load it by means of the Import rate file. In the Parsing log you can find a corresponding import batch for a manually loaded file or an automatically parsed email and open it in order to Match columns. When you finish with column matching, you may run Push/target report right from the Parsed rates window or move the records to the Import edit, where you can manually edit them and only after that run Push/target report. A new window will open, where the following options are available:

• Rate list type - type of rate list in a file/email (Target or push list).
• Areas to match to - stats areas set or Rate plan areas to match with areas in a target/push list. Stats areas sets are taken from the switch of from the config tables of Config-Objects.
• Match areas by codes - if your push/target list has area codes, you can match its areas with the areas from stats by the codes, not by matching the area names.
• Rate plan for areas - Rate plan which areas to match with areas in this table.
• Minimal margin - minimal margin between rates that is considered commercially attractive.

When you click OK, the System forms and opens a push/target report. The report contains several file parameters in comparison with statistics parameters including area names. They allow you to estimate potential benefits or losses for each area from the offered list. Revenue and Margin / Savings parameters are applicable for target lists only.

You can always recreate a report with new options using the Push/target report button right in the Push/target window. The Stats button lets you re-fetch statistical data.

The Rate alerts tool allows you to check and analyse rates increase for destinations you are currently sending traffic to.

There are 3 stages to the report:

1. First, the system just gets all the rates that changed over a given period. The interval and vendor Rate plans are set in the Rate alert report floating window: In this window you also set other options which will be used during the 2nd and 3rd stages (see 2. and 3. below). The Rate alert table that is open will give you results after implementing the 2nd stage, but you may view just the pure vendor rates that were changed in the View rate changes floating table: The procedure is 100% same as in the VendRate range table, however, the results are written to a separate tmp table in the DB so that you may use them multiple times later on (getting changed rates may take several minutes for all Rate plans, so we kind of cache the results to reuse them).

2. Second, we match the areas. This is done automatically if you start with stage 1, but you may also change the matching later on using cached rate changes via the Match button. We need to set customer code decks here because codes can be significantly different by code decks, we can only match vendor areas to each area in each code deck separately. Usually, if you know that you have only 2 main code decks, you may just choose them ignoring all others (test decks, etc.).

The table after stage 2 will look like this: The matching is done separately for 2 decks. How come we have so many rows for a Gldline deck? This is due to code mismatch between vendor and customer rates. The line with no vendor area or rate plan is there to show that there are extra codes in Brazil-Cell area that are not matched with changed vendor codes.

We also have stats areas to the right matched by names to code deck areas. If names are same or very close - the matching will be perfect, if not - we try to do our best to match areas by names. If this does not work in some weird cases - you may manually choose a different area.

Another matching here is Vendor Rate plan -> Vendor in stats. This is done either by name (it should match completely), or by choosing a proper stats object in the Rate plan table per each plan. 3. Third, we get the stats. At first, at the Area->Vendor level. Min. minutes allows you to cut off all the areas with no or very little traffic.

Then you may investigate each area individually, or just press the Expand all button to fetch all Customer->Area->Vendor stats. You may change the Alert margin,% on the fly, any rates that will have a lower margin will have a red tag on the right showing how short the actual margin is from the margin you need.

Customers in stats are matched to customer Rate plans in the same way as vendors.

Note that 2 customers are under the Gldline code deck, as their Rate plans belong to this deck, and one customer is under another deck.

The easiest way to investigate large tables with lots of changes would be, probably, by filtering by Margin alert ::<0 (filter at 2nd level), so you will only have the customers with alerts. You may also export any table as is to excel now, using the export in right-click menu, and then pressing the Download Excel file.