This document provides an overview of the CMP 8.12 release with specific focus on the additional functional and non-functional enhancements with respect to CMP 8.11.
This document is aimed at internal and external audiences familiar with CMP, to explain the key features of the release including any changes in how existing functions or processes are working.
With respect to CMP 8.11, CMP 8.12 introduces changes to existing functionality and non-functional improvements. These changes can be summarised as follows:
Subscription orders, introduced in CMP 8.12, allows an external system to create a new subscription as part of an order which may or may not include hardware such as a mobile device or SIM card for example. Existing orders functionality supports the integration to a warehouse for physical order fulfilment and the new eSIM functionality, described below, supports integration into a Subscription Manager platform (SM-DP+) for the purposes of an eSIM profile download. The subscription order can be processed immediately, on dispatch of any hardware from the warehouse or on activation by the customer on receipt of the hardware.
CMP 8.12 introduces support for subscription provisioning with an eSIM-enabled device. This may be a device already owned by the subscriber or one purchased as part of a subscription order. To enable a complete end-to-end solution, CMP has been pre-integrated with the 10T Tech eSIM Orchestration Platform that supports the full lifecycle management of an eSIM profile. CMP is integrated to 10T Tech using the standard ES2+ interface.
CMP integrates with 10T Tech to request a new eSIM profile for a subscriber with an eSIM-enabled device. Once the profile has been generated, CMP automatically generates an email containing a QR code enabling the end subscriber to download the eSIM profile to their device. When the subscriber downloads the profile, using the emailed QR code, and activates it on their device, CMP receives a notification from the 10T Tech platform that the platform has been activated so, if appropriate, billing can commence. Profile status changes are visible through AgentView.
The eSIM provisioning process also supports SIM swaps i.e. physical SIM to eSIM and eSIM to physical SIM.
In CMP 8.12, it is now possible to write off the outstanding overdue balance on an account when all other debt recovery actions have failed to get the customer to settle their debt. Write off is an explicit account movement step in the credit control procedure that changes the account type to 'written-off' and clears all open (not fully paid) invoices. A 'write-off' transaction is written to the Sales Ledger for the sum of all written off invoices.
When a customer is barred from making or receiving calls, typically as part of Credit Control, there is the need to optionally suspend charging on the account whilst the barring is in place i.e. until they pay the outstanding debt. In CMP 8.12, it is now possible to explicitly define a charging suspension step in the credit control procedure through an Account Movement workflow event. The account type will indicate that the account is suspended from charging and this can be seen through AgentView along with the charging suspension and resumption dates. If subsequently a payment is made to clear the debt, the account will resume charging. The customer will not be invoiced for service charges during the charging suspension period.
In CMP 8.11, it was not possible to move (cut & paste) a subscription from one account structure to another if the subscription was a real-time charging subscription i.e. a subscription provisioned on the OCS (Online Charging System). In CMP 8.12, this overall restriction has been lifted but some limitations still remain namely:
There are no such cut and paste restrictions if the subscriber is charged offline i.e. not in real-time.
As well as the ability to write off the outstanding debt on an account, CMP 8.12 also introduces the ability to write off a single invoice through AgentView. The ability to write off an invoice is controlled through function security.
In CMP 8.12, the Termination Costs panels within AgentView have been updated to provide a more detailed view of the costs involved should the subscription decide to terminate. The panel also provides an estimated final bill amount should all subscriptions under the account be terminated on the termination date supplied within the wizard.
As overviewed in section 2.1.3 above, charging can be suspended for an account as part of credit control. If this is the case, then the Account Summary screen shows the account type as 'Charging Suspended' and the suspension and resumption dates.
The following new REST web services have been added in CMP 8.12:
The details of these changes and other RESTful web service changes are detailed in section 3.7 below.
In CMP 8.11, proration of service charges (where configured) was calculated based on an average number of days in a month, 30.4. This had the effect of undercharging for months with 30 days or less and overcharging for months with 31 days. Overall, this averaged out but was more obvious when billing in arrears and caused customer complaints for overcharging. CMP 8.12 now supports the ability to prorate based on an average number of days in the month (30.4) or based on the exact number of days in a month. This is controlled by a new system property (see section 6.5.1 below).
CMP 8.12 now supports the suspension of charging in the case where a subscriber has been barred from making or receiving calls that may be the result of a credit control action for example. Any recurring charges active within a suspension period will not be charged until the charging suspension is lifted, usually as a result of a payment against the outstanding debt.
The functional and non-functional changes highlighted in section 2 above have had an impact CMP in the following areas:
Each time an eSIM profile is activated, deactivated or deleted by the end customer, CMP receives a notification from the Subscription Manager (SM-DP+) to advise of the profile status change.
These changes are stored in CMP and can be viewed through a new eSIM Status lower panel, accessible through the Profile main menu option, that also shows the EID (the identifier of the eSIM) and the ICCID (the global identifier of the profile) related to the status.
The Account Summary screen has been updated for CMP 8.12 as a result of the changes made to support charging suspension. 'Charging Suspended' and 'Charging Resumed' fields have been added on the lower right of the upper panel to show the last period when the account was suspended from charging. If no resumption date is shown, then this indicates that the account is currently suspended from charging and this will also be indicated by the account type being set to 'Charging Suspended'.
In addition to being able to write off the outstanding balance of an account for which the debt cannot be recovered, CMP 8.12 also introduces the ability to write off a single account invoice through the Transactions lower panel.
To enable this, a new 'Write Off' menu option has been provided when right-clicking on an open invoice within the Transactions lower panel accessible from the Financials main menu option.
In order to write off an existing invoice, an agent must have the function security WRITOFFINV assigned to their role.
In CMP 8.12, the Termination Costs panels within AgentView have been updated to provide a more detailed view of the costs involved should the subscription decide to terminate. In CMP 8.11, the panels only displayed termination costs but these have been enhanced to also output unbilled usage, other charges and an estimated final bill amount that takes into account the outstanding account balance.
CMP 8.12 does not provide any new Bulk Actions.
No Bulk Actions have been changed for CMP 8.12.
In CMP 8.11, it was very difficult to link a Batch Audit record and the Job Execution which created/updated it. On the Jobs List panel, the Last Batch column had a link to the latest batch, but this may not be the batch which was created or updated by that particular job.
In CMP 8.12, every execution of a job that operates on a batch now displays a hyperlink to that batch in the complete list of executions for that job. In the Batch Audit list panel, clicking on the Batch Count hyperlink now displays the Job Execution linked to that batch. In the Jobs list panel, clicking on the Recent Executions hyperlink for a batch run shows the Execution Id for that specific batch.
End user communication information is held in CMP to enable an agent to view sent comms.
Over time, these tables, in which this information is held, grows and to keep the system optimal in terms of performance, the comms data needs to be regularly purged.
To facilitate this, a new purge job has been developed in CMP 8.12 that deletes comms information from CMP.
This job removes records of customer communications and related information that are stored within CMP after a specific time period.
The job derives a calculated purge date based on how long data should be retained before it can be purged. The months to retain can be entered manually when the job is run.
If no value is provided then the value configured for the module property comms.purge.default.noofmonths will be used.
Only communications related data that was generated on or before the calculated purge date will be considered by the job.
In CMP 8.11, Invoice Production used a value of 30.4 when calculating the daily charge for a monthly priced service.
Where monthly charges are billed in arrears, this lead to varying prices which was confusing to the end consumer.
In CMP 8.12, Invoice Production has been changed to support an average days per month i.e. 30.4, or the actual days in a month, when calculating monthly charges.
Whether an average value or an exact value is used is controlled by a new system property, MONTHLY.CHARGING under the existing property group GENERAL_SETTINGS.
See section 6.5.1 for the specific values supported.
Invoice Production has also changed in CMP 8.12 to support the suspension of charging in the case where a subscriber has been barred from making or receiving calls. Any recurring charges active within a suspension period will not be charged so will be prorated up to the point of suspension and charged again once charging suspension is lifted. When billing in advance, a credit back will be given for the period of suspension.
The Workflow Monitor job has been modified in CMP 8.12 to support the write off of an account balance. Write off is an explicitly defined Account Movement step of the credit control procedure. For a write-off Account Movement action, the Workflow Monitor job will first verify that all subscriptions under the account have received their termination invoice before writing off the outstanding balance.
A subscription's contract start date is populated with the date the subscription was created. If the subscription was created as part of an order and the activation was by the customer themselves, it is possible that the connection might not happen until a few days later. Therefore, the contract start date should reflect the date the connection was confirmed.
In CMP 8.12, a change has been made to the Action Monitor job when processing a connection action to ensure that the contract start date on the subscription is aligned with the connection date.
The Order Dispatch job and daemon have been enhanced in CMP 8.12 to take subscription orders into consideration. With subscription orders, the warehouse may supply serial numbers as part of the order dispatch notification e.g. an MSISDN-SIM pair. If serial numbers are provided in the response from the warehouse, then they need to be validated and processed by the Order Dispatch job.
This change has necessitated a change to the order dispatch JSON schema to include an array of managed serial numbers. The version of the schema has been updated to v1.2.
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Management menu option in CMP 8.12.
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Monitoring menu option in CMP 8.12.
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Configuration menu option in CMP 8.12.
No changes have been made to any of the options within the System Administrator menu option in CMP 8.12.
No new Business Configuration screens have been introduced as part of the CMP 8.12 release.
No Business Configuration screens have been changed as part of the CMP 8.12 release.
There are no new Pricing Configuration screens that have been introduced as part of CMP 8.12.
No Pricing Configuration screens have been changed as part of CMP 8.12.
No new SOAP web services have been introduced as part of the CMP 8.12 release.
No SOAP web services have been changed as part of the CMP 8.12 release.
A new POST Account web service has been added to support the creation of a CMP account from an external system.
A new POST Subscription web service allows a subscription to be created under an existing CMP account.
A set of new Orders web services have been added to allow for both hardware and subscription orders to be created in CMP. Additional web services have been added to allow existing orders to be queried.
The POST Order web service allows both hardware only orders and subscription orders to be created in CMP from an external system such as a web shop. A hardware order is one that has no subscription creation or subscription upgrade associated with it. Integration to a warehouse enables hardware orders to be managed from creation through to order dispatch from the warehouse.
A subscription order allows a subscription to be created under an existing CMP account and may or may not have associated hardware, such as a SIM card or mobile phone, as part of the order. The order can be activated immediately i.e. the subscription is created in CMP and connected immediately, activated on order dispatch i.e. when any physical goods in the order are dispatched by the warehouse, or activated by the customer themselves on receipt of the hardware items.
The GET Orders web service allows an external system to retrieve summary details of all the orders created against an account. The web service supports filtering by the order status so either all orders or only open orders can be returned.
The GET Order web service allows the details of a specific account order to be queried using the order number.
The GET Subscription web service response has been updated to return any identification details of the subscription. Previously the object was returned but always appeared as 'null' irrespective of whether identification was held against the subscription or not.
The GET Compatible Packages web service response has been updated to return details for the unit of measure in the allowances response object.
The Activate Subscription web service request has been updated to include an array of managed numbers allowing one or more managed numbers to be added as part of the subscription activation process.
No new Business Configuration RESTful web services have been introduced in CMP 8.12.
No RESTful web services have been updated as part of the CMP 8.12 release.
The CMP 8.12 release supports the first TM Forum API set around Payment Management. This has been certified by the TM Forum against the TM676 API specification.
As described in section 2.1.2 above, CMP 8.12 introduces support for eSIM provisioning that enables a new subscription to request an eSIM profile as part of a subscription registration. As part of the solution, CMP has been integrated with the eSIM Orchestration platform provided by 10T Tech using the standard ES2+ interface. The 10T Tech platform provides eSIM orchestration and an SM-DP+ that is responsible for the generation and download of an eSIM profile to an eSIM-enabled device.
The NetEngage-specific adapters are optional components of the CMP deployment that are based on the licence agreement with MDS Global.
No changes have been made to the NetEngage adapter as part of CMP 8.12.
The Openet-specific adapters are optional components of the CMP deployment that are based on the licence agreement with MDS Global.
No changes have been made to the Openet adapter as part of CMP 8.12.
The Lifecycle-specific adapters are optional components of the CMP deployment that are based on the licence agreement with MDS Global.
No changes have been made to the Lifecycle adapter as part of CMP 8.12.
No changes have been made to UK-specific adapters in CMP 8.12.
In addition to functional and non-functional changes and improvements, the CMP 8.12 product also addresses a number of application support issues. This section provides a summary of the issues fixed in this release.
The following issues have been addressed within this release:
| Reference | Area | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CMPIS-2699 | Advance Notification | It was not possible to remove/disable specific advance notifications. |
| CMPIS-2684 | AgentView | It was not possible to view units associated with an invoice via AgentView. |
| CMPIS-2672 | Credit Control | The Credit Control job was exiting when an account was on a suspended Account Type. |
| CMPIS-2668 | Action Monitor | The serial number was not being updated on the subscription table when a number change was attempted for a not connected subscription and the subscription was connected afterwards. |
| CMPIS-2663 | AgentView | If the default AgentView font was changed post deployment then the font was being reset on a subsequent upgrade. |
| CMPIS-2654 | Billing | It was observed that some agreements were not having their next expected invoice date updated correctly within Invoice Production. |
| CMPIS-2641 | Openet Provisioning Adapters | Allocation Monitor Failures. |
| CMPIS-2636 | Framework | An intermittent deadlock was observed when starting multiple Sabre Server Instances. |
| CMPIS-2635 | AgentView | The termination fee shared service was not taking the contract end date into account when calculating termination fees. |
| CMPIS-2632 | Web Services | The REST Create Subscription web service caused an error when trying to view the new subscription in AgentView. |
| CMPIS-2631 | Sabre Jobs | In some circumstances it was observed that Sabre Jobs can run endlessly as the job is continuously looping. |
| CMPIS-2630 | Business Configuration | It was not possible to set Billing offset to 0 in the Edit Service panel. |
| CMPIS-2620 | Billing | The Bill Print job was failing with a number of different errors. |
| CMPIS-2619 | Sabre Jobs | While running the Rated Usage job it was noticed that there are multiple interface batch header records being created for the same file. |
| CMPIS-2615 | Action Monitor | Pagination was missing entire pages of work in Action Monitor. |
| CMPIS-2612 | Sabre Jobs | This fix addresses performance issues in the Rated Usage and Invoice Production jobs at large volumes. |
| CMPIS-2602 | Action Monitor | The Action Monitor job was attempting to write a duplicate record to the Subscription Bar table which is keyed by subscription number, bar date and bar time. |
| CMPIS-2601 | Workflow Monitor | Pagination was missing entire pages of work in Workflow Monitor. |
| CMPIS-2600 | Admin Console | An Active MQ JMS connection issue was observed with sabre daemons. |
| CMPIS-2599 | Billing | The Bill Print file was not being created due to a deadlock with the Usage Archiving job. |
| CMPIS-2596 | Billing | The standard module configuration for the file locations for the Bill Print Transmission Daemon were mismatched. |
| CMPIS-2588 | Advance Notification | An advance notification was being raised for a recurring bolt-on when the expiry date was less than the warning date. |
| CMPIS-2566 | Web Services | The REST Get Usages web service was not working for billed usage. |
| CMPIS-2562 | Web Services | The REST Create Account was not creating personal address records. |
| CMPIS-2561 | Serial Number Management | When attempting to load a large batch of SIMs, the SIM Profile job timed out. |
| CMPIS-2547 | Billing | A time out issue was observed with the Invoice Posting job. |
| CMPIS-2543 | Billing | The isPosted flag was being set incorrectly within the Invoice Posting job when the job failed. |
| CMPIS-2479 | Web Services | The REST Get Estimate Bills web service incorrectly included expired services. |
| CMPIS-2391 | Comms | The factory configuration data population script to insert a record into the commsFieldBean table incorrectly state paymentDateAmount as the parameter rather than paymentAmount. |
| CMPIS-2359 | Business Configuration | The Corporate Only flag was displaying incorrectly in the Edit Price Plan panel. |
| CMPIS-2336 | Admin Console | In some cases when an adaptor shuts down because it has reached a retry limit for example, the adaptor still shows as active in the Admin Console. |
| CMPIS-1502 | Business Configuration | The ordering of Credit Control Procedure Stages was incorrect. |
| CMPIS-712 | Usage Archiving | An error was observed when archiving was not submitted on the same day as the Bill Print job. |
The product documentation is available online on the documentation portal. This online portal requires authorised access, which can be obtained by contacting MDS Global support. The documentation is also available as downloadable PDFs as follows:
| Document | Version | Document Changes |
|---|---|---|
| Installation Guide | 1.0 | The prerequisites, services, Installation Configuration Tool and other topics have been updated. |
| Technical Architecture | 1.0 | The third party software versions have been updated in the Technical Architecture document. |
| CMP Overview | 1.0 | There are no updates to the CMP Overview as part of CMP 8.12. |
| Documentation Overview | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Documentation Overview as part of CMP 8.12. |
| System Administration Guide | 1.0 | The CMP High Availability Deployment diagram has been updated to represent Sabre Server as an Active Group in Location 2. |
| Security Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Security Guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
| AgentView Function Security Guide | 1.0 | The function seurity related to the ability to write off an invoice has been added to the AgentView Function Security Guide. |
| Operational Overview | 1.0 | The Operational Overview has been updated for the changes to the jobs and daemons highlighted in section 3.3 above. |
| Business Configuration Overview | 1.0 | The Credit Management topic has been updated to include the Write Off credit control stage as a result of the write-off capability introduced in CMP 8.12. |
| Billing Functionality Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Billing Functionality Guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
| Communications Functionality and Configuration Guide | 1.0 | Links to tables and table definitions have been removed in the Communications Guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
| Payments Functionality Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Payments Functionality Guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
| Extracts Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Extracts Guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
| Purge Guide | 1.0 | Tables have been renamed in the Purge Guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
| Standard Reporting | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Standard Reporting Guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
| Batch Jobs and JSON Schemas Guide | 1.0 | The Batch Jobs and JSON Schemas Guide has been updated to include the changes to the jobs and daemons highlighted above. |
| RESTFul Web Services API Guide | 1.0 | The REST web services guide has been updated based on the changes highlighted in section 3.7.1 above. |
| SOAP Web Services Semantics Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the SOAP web services guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
| Business Configuration RESTFul Web Services API Guide | 1.0 | There are no updates to the Business Configuration RESTFul web services guide as part of CMP 8.12. |
Online help is available in AgentView, Business Configuration, the Administration Console and the Bulk Actions console. The following table summarises the current versions of the online help and the changes since CMP 8.11:
| Online Help | Version | Document Changes |
|---|---|---|
| AgentView | 1.2 | The following topics have been added or updated as a result of changes made to AgentView in CMP 8.12:
|
| Business Configuration | 1.16 | The following changes have resulted in changes to Business Configuration online help:
|
| Administration Console | 1.14 | The following topics have been added in the Admin Console help in CMP 8.12:
|
| Bulk Action Console | 1.6 | The following topics have been added in the Bulk Action Console help in CMP 8.12:
|
The CMP 8.12 installer includes the capability to upgrade a CMP 8.11 installation without the loss of configuration or customer data provided that the software, file system and database structure of the installation in question are at no point manually modified.
The CMP 8.12 Installation Guide, and the details below, should be read before attempting the upgrade to CMP 8.12.
It is important that the following sections are read prior to performing the upgrade, specifically the Configuration Changes section, as it may be advisable to backup relevant configuration prior to performing the upgrade to ensure the configuration can be replicated, if necessary, post upgrade.
It is important that the CMP 8.11.0.1 patch has been installed prior to the upgrade to CMP 8.12. This contains important database updates that need to installed prior to the start of the CMP 8.12 upgrade. The installer will automatically check that this patch has been installed and will fail if this is not the case.
It is important that the existing installation is left running before starting the upgrade. There is no reason to shut down any components however service may be affected whilst performing the upgrade.
The following changes have been made to the Installation Configuration Tool as part of CMP 8.12:
The following third party libraries have been updated for CMP 8.12:
The following tables have been added in CMP 8.12:
No views have been added to the database schema in CMP 8.12.
The following table attributes have been added in CMP 8.12:
A creationDate attribute has been added to the following tables to enable partitions to be created to support the new comms purging job:
No tables or views have been dropped in CMP 8.12.
No table attributes have been dropped in CMP 8.12.
No table attributes have been modified in CMP 8.12.
As part of CMP 8.12, the following new property will be added to the External Configuration module and needs to be defined post installation/upgrade:
AVERAGE (uses an average of 30.4 days/month) or ACTUAL (uses the actual number of days in the month)The External Configuration module has also been updated to group properties together to make configuration easier. Tooltip text has now been added for all properties.
As part of the changes to support invoice write-offs, as described in section 3.1.2.2 above, additional functional security must be set up in CMP. The roleDiseFunctionName table should include the following row:
| Function Name | Description | Role |
|---|---|---|
| WRITOFFINV | Write Off Invoice | add-adjustments |
As part of CMP 8.12, the standard data population scripts used to auto-populate a number of CMP configuration tables for a greenfield installation have been updated. For existing installations, the configuration specified in this section will need to be manually configured if required.
If CMP is deployed with the 10T Tech eSIM Orchestration platform, then the following configuration changes have, and will need to be, made to CMP:
The following records will need to be manually created in the database:
| Code | Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
| ESIM | eSIM Activation Code | 7 |
| Code | Alias |
|---|---|
| ESIM | ACTVTNCODE |
| Description | Min. Length | Max. Length | Rule | P1 Allow Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| eSIM ActivationCode | 10 | 100 | O | 1 |
ESIM.To enable a communication to be sent to the end user containing the QR code to be scanned to download the eSIM profile to the device, the following additional configuration changes will need to be made to CMP through the Business Configuration menu options indicated:
RESOURCEATTRIBUTEBEAN.| Group | Code | Description |
|---|---|---|
| COMMSFIELDCAT | ESIM | eSIM |
eSIM as created above for the Descriptive Title.
The 'Supported Levels' shall be defined as 'Subscription' and RESOURCEATTRIBUTEBEAN shall be selected as the 'Bean Id'. The 'Data Source' should be 'Internal' and the parameter defined as field=activationCode.
The maximum length of the activation code should be set as 100.<Comms Code>-<Comms Code Language(2)>-EMAIL-html.vm. The following line can be used to display the QR code:
<img alt="$fieldDataMap['<Comms Field Code>-FileName']" src="data:image/png;base64,$fieldDataMap['<Comms Field Code>-Image']" style="width:256px;height:256px;"/>.
The comms that is sent to the end subscriber with the QR code for download of the eSIM profile, is generated from the workflow raised when the eSIM profile has been generated by 10T Tech.
A new workflow code needs to be defined that is raised with a status of Pending Auto Processing and has a status of Resolved after confirmation.
Finally, the comms code created above needs to linked to this new eSIM dispatch workflow. The communication should be sent on resolution of the associated workflow event.