Use cases for specifying price information

This section describes common cost model pricing use cases that you encounter as IT support staff. Calbro Services user personas help to illustrate the user scenarios. The typical steps described by these use cases are in keeping with BMC best practices.

The IT department at Calbro Services is providing cloud-based applications to the customers. The users of these applications need to budget their usage of the service for next year. Also the IT department needs additional funding to increase the servers for new applications. Paula is the service Manager for the IT organization that provides these applications. She is required to provide a cost estimate for the services that her organization offers. Any organizations using the services can use the cost estimates to generate budget estimates. Paula also needs to analyze the profit or loss incurred by her organization for the applications that they support.

Paula can use the Pricing feature of BMC Service Cost Management in the following ways:

• Using current cost model scenario
  1. Paula selects a cost model scenario that has a interconnected web of cost models that model the services offered by the IT organization.
  2. Paula assesses the cost of providing each business service for current fiscal year.
  3. Based on the cost information, she specifies price values in the cost models for various business services.
  4. Paula can now analyze chargeback and generate bill of IT in terms of Price.
  5. All organizations using the business services can use the bill of IT data to budget for the utilization of the services.
  6. Paula can use the chargeback information to provide cost estimates to various organizations for a service.
  7. Paula can also use the Service Cost Analysis Profit/Loss portlet to analyze the profit or loss incurred for a service by her organization.

• Using copy of current scenario for what-if analysis
  1. Paula provides price information in the current active cost model scenario for all business services that are offerred by her organization.
  2. She then creates a copy of the existing cost model scenario. A new copy of the scenario gives her the flexibility of updating data related to any cost model or cost model element in that scenario without impacting the original (Active) scenario.
  3. She updates the price information for all business services based on yearly projections. The new scenario now depicts the service models with variations for price.
  4. She uses Service Cost Analysis portlets to compare the two scenarios.
  5. After analysis and approval, she activates the most efficient and profitable cost model scenario.
  6. All organizations using the business services can use the bill of IT data to budget for the utilization of the services.
  7. Paula can use the chargeback information to provide cost estimates to various organizations for a service.