CostGuard Version 21.6 Details

Enhancements for managing protection plans are being deployed over multiple releases. Functionality is being deployed in 21.6 to support this effort. Additional enhancements will be delivered in a future release, including the ability to sell protection plans on a monthly recurring charge (MRC) basis or as a one time charge assessed at the time of sale.

Note: It is recommended that you not use the Protection Plan Management functionality available in the CostGuard 21.5 and 21.6 releases until the full functionality of this feature is made available in a subsequent release.

IDI release 21.5 provided new functionality to help users comply with ASC 606 revenue recognition standards. IDI Release 21.6 provides two additional reports:

• Active Contract Asset Value by Account report can be used to audit the current value of the Contract Assets by Account and Service.
• Forfeited Contract Revenue report can be used to assess the disconnected contracts and details that contribute to the calculation of the forfeited contract revenue amount.

IDI version 21.5 provided new functionality to support generating and storing QR codes for orders with eSIM devices where subscribers need to scan the QR code into their phone to complete the activation process.

IDI version 21.6 updates Create SIM and Get a SIM in the Service and Feature Management web service to return ALL available fields.

A new Service Catalog Group Charge Detail optional XML report is available to group recurring and non-recurring charges for services by product catalog group. The report provides the details of the recurring and non-recurring charges for a service. The report has flexibility to configure multiple product catalog groups for selection and provide separate sections and totals for each product catalog group.

Setup is required to use the new report. The report must be enabled for the applicable invoice format. This setting is not available to IDI platform users and must be completed by an authorized IDI associate. Also,  users will be required to add a Product Catalog Group Class of Service Catalog Group XML and associate it to one or more product catalog groups in Admin Console Data Management. The report output will be grouped by product catalog groups associated to this class.

FIPS Codes (Federal Information Processing Standards codes) are stored with customer contact information to ensure uniform identification of geographic entities such as cities, counties and towns. Editing a customer contact and saving the changes resulted in the system overwriting the FIPS information with NULL if business rules dictated not validating the address (so the address was not validated). This was due to the system saving address validation information to the database, even though the validation step was skipped. Now in this scenario, CostGuard does not save address validation information so the FIPS information is preserved.

You can reproduce/test as follows:

Find a contact that has AddressValidationTaxFIPS information

From the edit contact screen in Customer Care, edit the contact, but do not change or validate the address (e.g.add a phone number or change the name)

Save the change

Before PR fix deployed: FIPS would be overwritten and display as blank

After PR fix deployed: FIPS information is still displayed

This solution addresses an issue with poor performance when loading billing orders on the Order History page in Customer Care (Orders > Order History). This issue was initially addressed by PR 83538 (CostGuard version 20.9); however, the improvements only applied for systems on versions of SQL 2017 or newer. Then PR 83589 (CostGuard version 21.1) was provided to improve performance for systems with SQL 2014 as well.; however, users were still experiencing slow loading times.

PR 83667 provides a further improvement to the billing order search logic to improve the time it takes to load the Order History screen in Customer Care.

Users not having OnlineBill Admin permission were able to delete all orphan user customer records. The remove broken security links button was displayed for all users, even if they didn’t have the permission needed to perform the action. The User Administration page showed the broken security link message next to each OnlineBill user in the grid even if the user didn’t have view or manage user permission in Security.

A check has been added for the Delete All and Delete orphaned user customer functions. This check ensures users must have either view or manage user permission in Security to perform these functions to prevent unauthorized deletion of data.

A feature set up to bill in-advance and credit on disconnect did not properly credit on disconnect when there was a bill cycle change. When the bill run calculating the credit occurred in the first bill period for the new bill cycle (after a cycle change), the period to credit could be incorrectly calculated.

Billing logic when crediting an in-advance charge after a bill cycle change was updated to use the previously billed out charge end date, and not the current bill period end date when determining the amount of days to credit.

Billing was running long in the case of many services with usage on an account.

Performance enhancements have been made to improve and shorten the runtime.

Prepaid services were erroneously suspended by the Advance Pay scheduled job. This could happen when the Rating job failed to run to completion with Rate New Usage selected, and the Advance Pay job would then run before there was a successful full Rerate of all bill cycles.

CostGuard has been updated to prevent the Advance Pay scheduled job from running in this situation until there is a successful full Rerate of all bill cycles.

The CAMEL Service Key was not getting populated for voice CDRs from the Ericsson MSS (EMS) format. This value was therefore not getting populated on the corresponding TAP outcollect record for the call. The EMS parser expected the value to be in decimal, but values were in Hex.

The EMS parser has been updated to convert the Service Key value from Hex to decimal before storing the value in CDREventGSM.CAMELServiceKey.