Service contracts and pooling parameters

Your corporate contract may have pooling, if it does, you can set the parameters in the Service Contracts section of Cimpl.

Pooling offers corporations the option of grouping together certain types of usage to make use of the "extra" allowable going to waste by the lower-use services. By "pooling" a type of usage together, there is less "waste", and less cost overrun because the power-users are taking advantage of the lesser-users' unused minutes, messaging, data, long distance.

The precise details of pooling rules and procedures vary by contract and provider. As such, how a pooling plan works for one segment or type of your organization’s services and equipment often does not apply to how pooling operates for another segment of your services. Therefore, never make assumptions regarding the automatic expansion or reduction of available pooled resources when you add or remove devices and services to a given pool. Always verify the details of your service contract when you make modifications to the group of devices or services covered by a pooling plan, or have your Cimpl support agent do so for you.

Here are three examples that outline why caution is important when dealing with pooling:

Pooling can be established such that all devices in an organization, regardless of type, draw their usage from a pool of data that does not grow as devices are added.

Example: The organization has a bucket of 50GB of data to be used per month by any of the services (lines) in the account.
Pooling can be established such that all devices in an organization, regardless of type (e.g., smart phones, tablets, etc.), each individually contribute to the full pool of available data to be consumed by all users as it’s added. Should this be the case, each device’s individual usage is drawn from the full pool of available data.

Example: All data-enabled lines in the account have 5GB of data. They all contribute to the “pool” of available data. Therefore, when one user exceeds 5GB of data, the remainder is taken from another user’s data and so on.
Pooling can be established such that the pool of data only expands when a certain type of device is added, but not others.

Example: iPhones and Smart Phones contribute to the pool of data because they each have 10GB of data included in their plans. Tablets though, have a plan costing $0.00 but use the data of the iPhones and Smart Phones.

By default, Cimpl can accurately track and report on the pooling scenario in example 2 (i.e., all devices sharing the same pooling definition of allowance will equally contribute to the pool. As such, the more devices are added with the same pooling the definition, the more the overall pool will increase). Cimpl will group all services and devices assigned to the plan in order to calculate totals and overages. In situations where devices or services draw from a pool of data but do not contribute to any expansions in the pool, Cimpl’s default tracking for pooling cannot accurately calculate overages. When you have to track such a plan, please contact your Cimpl support agent, to assess the creation of an alternate ad-hoc report or to have a Cimpl support agent login directly to the provider website to download the report for tracking purposes if you opted for a managed services plan.

Select pooling parameters:

Go to Configuration > Administration > Service Contracts.
Select the service contract. The service contract's record opens.
Select the Pooling Parameters tab. This tab allows you to configure report parameters for information on usage, overage, and costs of pooled voice, data, message, and long-distance features associated with your users.

Note: These options are only available for service contracts associated with compatible wireless services types.
Select or clear pooling parameters and their related thresholds by clicking on the corresponding check boxes.

Note: An alert appears when you clear a previously configured pooling parameters. Click Yes to confirm or Cancel to discard.
- Voice Pooling: This parameter can be configured to display thresholds for any of the following:
  1. Allowed minutes per service
  2. Cost of additional minutes
  3. Currency type
- Data Pooling: The data pooling parameters can be configured to display thresholds for any of the following:
  1. Allowed data volume per service. Data is saved in one of two unit formats – either gigabytes (GB) or megabytes (MB). The choice of a data unit is set by clicking the onscreen toggle.
  2. Cost of additional data
  3. Currency type
- Messages Pooling: The messages pooling parameter can be configured to display thresholds for any of the following:
  1. Allowed messages per service
  2. Cost of additional messages
  3. Currency type
- Long-Distance Pooling: The long-distance pooling parameter can be configured to display thresholds for any of the following:
  1. Allowed minutes per service
  2. Cost of additional minutes
  3. Currency type
Click Apply.