Price
In this chapter you will learn more about how prices on products can be influenced in Telefakt and the mechanisms used to do so.
Pricing
The product catalogue incorporates different methods for pricing, it supports one-off, periodic, usage-based, and attribute-based pricing.
One-off pricing is straight forward, the price set on the product will be charged once and exactly once the first time customer is invoiced when the line is active.
Periodic pricing means the customer will pay a recurring amount on the interval defined by the time period of the product.
Usage-based is for the likes of telephony and the price of the line will vary from invoice to invoice based on the customers usage of the service.
Attribute-based pricing allows, for example, pricing based on geographical distance or connection speed. Any attribute in the catalogue can be used for this. Such distance-based charging has been used a number of times by GlobalConnect’s predecessors. Similarly, attribute-based pricing can provide location-based pricing – i.e. using the customer’s absolute location rather than relative distance to choose a different price rate.
Pricelist
Pricelists group products together into a set of products and defines a price for each of the products in the list. A customer must have a pricelist assigned to them, the customer will only be able to order products that are in their pricelist and the price for their services are also determined by the pricelist. There can be multiple pricelists for different classes of customer, or individual customers, with each price in the pricelist able to have multiple validity-periods to have them automatically come into, and out of, effect as defined by the product manager.
Campaigns
Campaigns are used to offer a special discount on a set of products for a set of customers normally for a limited time. In Telefakt campaign definitions have two parts: qualification parameters, and the type(s) of discount to be applied. Qualification can be on any combination of order-type, order-date, contract-length, and product.
The discounts applied can take two forms: Running discount for the lifetime of the service, or discount over a special period. The special period can be defined to be added to the contract length. One or both forms of discounting can be present in any single campaign.
The discounts themselves can be of three kinds: a percentage discount, an absolute discount, or a fixed price.
The implementation of campaigns has been done in a particular manner in the catalogue to ensure that external product-segment accounting and business intelligence analysis appropriately report revenue without any changes being required for them to support the discounting. Along with the financial clarity, the presence of special period discounting products is also unambiguous even in external systems. Finally, these campaign definitions are directly linked to the orders to which they have been applied and are therefore visible directly in the customers order.
Discounting
Independent of the pricelists (but using their prices), the discount modelling can base itself on many factors. For example, number of transactions, total monetary amounts, and calculated over various qualifying periods. Stepped discounting can be based on amount-ranges (e.g. 1-100, 101-200, etc.), and similarly for number of items. Discounts of any of the above types can be based on aggregated totals from hierarchical groups of customers, or arbitrarily linked customers.
All such discounts can be applied to individual products, groups of products, pricelists, and/or customers.
Synchronising
There is comprehensive catalogue synchronisation support between different instances of Telefakt. This allows, for example, products, attributes, pricelists to be prototyped in one instance of Telefakt, and then all, or selectively parts thereof, to be deployed (by overwriting or merging) to other instances.
Product dependencies
There is basic support in Telefakt for modelling product-product dependencies, and indeed the modelling of its close-cousin: upgrade/downgrade-paths. However, for historical political reasons, its use was discouraged and so not developed at GlobalConnect.