You want fries with that? Telecom service ordering is no 'drive-through' experience

Ordering services from carriers is certainly nothing like getting fast food, and as networks become more interconnected and services more varied, the ordering process stands to become only more complex. As this happens, carriers will either invest in solutions that will help them manage the process or risk losing business to competitors that move orders faster.

Service ordering problems have been hampering markets for years. As carriers have attempted to broaden their service strategies, these problems have only grown, and are even becoming competitive sticking points. For instance, wireless competitors, especially personal communication services providers, are promoting quicker service activation as one of their competitive assets. Also, some carriers, including Pacific Bell (see story on page 16), have been hit particularly hard by consumer and competitor complaints because of the primitive state of their order processing systems.

Recent industry recognition of service ordering pitfalls is a genuine response to competition, said Dan Taylor, senior analyst at the Aberdeen Group in Boston. "[Incumbent carriers] never had to be efficient at service ordering before, but the order process has become a point of differentiation for new competitors," he said.

"The traditional [local exchange carriers] have had a propensity to build their own ordering systems internally," added Boyd Peterson, director of consumer communications at The Yankee Group. "We're seeing the dawn of recognition that they are now stuck with antiquated systems and need something more robust and integrated.

The answer to carriers' woes may lie in new software solutions that integrate operations support systems (OSSs), billing databases and network management systems to better process service orders.

The latest such product, Kenan Systems' Arbor/OM, will hit the market next month. Arbor/OM integrates with carrier OSSs, billing systems, fraud databases and circuit provisioning systems to help streamline service ordering and maintenance.

"The ordering process can get messed up easily. At the big carriers, large rooms of people do nothing but correct service orders," said Randy Fuller, product marketing manager at Kenan Systems, and a former AT&T sales manager. "Arbor/OM acts as the cockpit that tells all the other downstream systems to fulfill their part of the service ordering process.

For instance, Arbor/OM might interconnect with a circuit provisioning product such as MetaSolv's Telecom Solutions Suite and a billing system to manage a customer order for additional Sonet circuits. Most legacy ordering systems have some manual element, do not integrate well with newer billing systems and do not track the ordering process well.

Kenan's Arbor/OM is integrated with the company's Arbor/BP billing platform, and both are designed to manage a multiservice environment, said Fuller. However, OM also will work with other vendors' billing systems.

Arbor/OM uses interactive screens to present customer information to carriers' customer service representatives. It also allows the service reps to initiate an order workflow schedule based on business rules defined by the carrier. Scheduled tasks are passed along to the other order-handling systems, and query tools can be used to track workflow. The solution operates on Unix servers running Sybase 11, Windows 95 and NT 4.0 clients.

Carriers of all types will invest more in order process re-engineering and new order management systems over the next few years. "The carriers really aren't that far along in doing so yet. They've initiated projects but not to the degree that will be necessary. I'd rather see them get their operation support functions in order before they concentrate on rolling out [digital subscriber line] and other technologies," said Taylor.

As this happens, vendor development of similar products is likely to boom. MetaSolv's TSS addresses some of the same aspects as Arbor/OM, and other companies reportedly have products in the works.

NETSCAPE SOFTWARE ARM FINDS NEW HOME Network Computer Inc., a software unit of Oracle Corp., has agreed to buy Navio Communications, Netscape Communications Corp.'s network computing software arm. Oracle will merge Navio's operations, focused on consumer products, with those of the business-oriented NCI to bolster its efforts in creating a software foundation for distributed computing.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS Nine of the nation's major Internet service providers have formed an association aimed at making the Internet more robust and reliable. IOPS.ORG-members of which include ANS Communications, AT&T, BBN Corp. EarthLink Network, GTE, MCI, Netcom, PSINet and UUNet-will focus on resolving and preventing network integrity problems, addressing issues that require technical coordination and sharing technical information among ISPs.