Pricing migration to Oracle PDC from Pricing Center

This blog describes the process of migrating existing pricing data from the Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management database to the Oracle communications pricing design center database.

Why Oracle Pricing Design Center?

The Oracle Communications Pricing Design Center (PDC) is a web-based application for rapid design and deployment of product offerings, supporting the full spectrum of pricing capabilities of the underlying charging and rating solutions.

With its business-driven workflows to create and manage product offerings, Pricing Design Center enables the communications service provider to create new offers and promotions in minutes, a key element of success in an increasingly demanding and competitive market.

How to Migrate to Pricing Design Center?

Pricing migration is also the same as any other data migration: Extract Pricing data from the OBRM database, transform into the target system’s data model, and load the extracted data to the PDC database.

The pricing migration process can be categorized into the following phases:

●        Data analysis:  – In this phase, the pricing data from the OBRM database is extracted and analyzed for any errors in existing pricing configurations or errors due to data model changes in the pricing design center. The Errors found in this phase need to be fixed in order to proceed to the next phase. Analysis reports are analyzed, respective configuration changes done in OBRM before restarting the migration process


                                                                               Data Analysis Process 

●        Data migration:  – In this phase, the pricing data from the OBRM database is extracted, transformed, and enriched to the PDC data model and then loaded into the PDC database

▪        The migration utility adjusts OBRM pricing data in the XML files, as required, to enable the transformation of the PDC data model

▪        The migration utility transforms OBRM pricing data to PDC components and saves them in XML files

▪        The migration utility loads PDC components into the PDC database

▪        The migration utility loads new & updated OBRM objects (resulting from the data adjustments) into the OBRM database

▪        The migration utility generates a migration report with information about OBRM objects that were successfully migrated to the PDC database

▪        The migration utility generates the process report with information about the BRM objects that were created or updated in the OBRM database

                                                                                        Migration Overview 

The pricing migration is a bottom-up approach, all the configuration objects are migrated first and then pricing objects are migrated.

Configuration objects include data such as metadata and setup data.

⮚        Metadata

⮚        Setup data

The following are the Pricing objects categories:

●        Products and the following objects referenced in the products are migrated

●        Discounts and all objects referenced in the discounts

●        Sponsorship

●        Subscription

Pricing migration strategy:

✔        Create a backup of the OBRM database and make sure pricing data from production is available in the OBRM database

✔        Install WebLogic and PDC

✔        Install ECE if the migration is from the batch rating engine to ECE

✔        Identify the functional gaps between the Pricing center and PDC. Make a list of the changes that need to be done in the existing pricing components in order to migrate such configurations that are not supported in PDC as it is and prepare scripts to correct them

✔        Cleanup or correct the invalid pricing objects or pricing configurations from the current BRM system as it may lead to errors during migration. All such data can be easily found during the data analysis phase

✔        Get the list of the pricing configurations that are used in the current system but not supported in the Pricing design center and reconfigure those objects to make them compatible with the Pricing design center

✔        Migrate Pricing components from OBRM to Pricing design center by using the migration utility provided as part of the Pricing design center installation

✔        Get fixes from Oracle by raising Oracle SR’s for any issues found during this process

✔        Restart the WebLogic and supported components like syncPDC, RRE, and BRE

✔        Start testing the new system once the migration is done