Hands-free fulfillment

Service providers face the seemingly impossible challenge of continuously increasing market share by adding new customers and services while at the same time retaining existing customers, driving down operating expenses and keeping prices competitive.

Automated service fulfillment can help service providers gain the much sought-after competitive edge

For providers facing these challenges, service fulfillment is one of the most important business processes. Many carriers have built - or are building - facilities-based networks. Once these networks are in place, though, the focus shifts to attracting customers and provisioning revenue-generating service. In the past, service providers used manual processes for service provisioning. Orders were taken from customers, service was configured manually and circuits were activated by working with multiple element management systems across a multivendor network. Finally, field personnel would perform manual testing to verify accurate provisioning and service quality (Figure 1).

Second generation service fulfillment involved stand-alone software operations support systems (OSSs), each addressing an individual component of this process. Some systems handled order management and configuration, others provided service activation and still others addressed centralized testing. No single system could perform all these activities. While this environment allowed centralization of activities in the network operations center (NOC), each system was operating in isolation, often creating bottlenecks and inconsistencies at various steps in the process.

Compounding the problem, each system provided its own partial database, making data reconciliation expensive and time-consuming. Even when integration could be achieved, this situation was further exacerbated because (offline) inventories quickly became inaccurate.

The new generation of OSS solutions, linked by open interfaces, offers a way to address these challenges. These solutions integrate products that help streamline the design, provisioning and testing of new and existing circuits and services. However, to realize the full benefit of automation, the issue of information accuracy must be resolved. Otherwise, the advantages of automation are lost in rejected and reworked orders. With integration and synchronization in place, the advantages of process automation can flow directly to the service providers' bottom line by reducing labor costs and keeping customers satisfied.

The challenges Industry dynamics have created both a buyer's and a seller's market. Communications consumers have more choices than ever before, and carriers face stiffer competition. Yet, New Paradigm Resources Group reported that total revenues of facilities-based competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) were 14 times greater than those of competitive providers in 1996.

Surveys have shown that price and variety of services are key differentiators in consumers' minds. Cost of service is the single largest area for dissatisfaction among customers, according to The House Telecommunications Customer Satisfaction Survey.

The Strategis Group estimates that nearly 47% of businesses will subscribe to a bundle of two or more services, according to the group's national survey of telecom managers. With a 10% discount, an additional 16% of businesses would subscribe to such a bundle.

This booming, yet fluid market makes it difficult for service providers to keep pace with customer requests. The majority of communications customers request telephone system change orders at least once a year, according to the House survey.

Service providers strive to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Top-notch customer service and superior time to market for new products and services often are the competitive weapons carriers need. The right OSS solution can help providers gain these advantages while controlling operating costs. The wrong OSSs can put carriers at an enormous disadvantage.

Service fulfillment includes the four steps required to bring a new service online fundamentally: order management, configuration, activation and testing.

Previous generation OSSs often created more problems than answers. No single vendor could deliver an entire service fulfillment solution, so best-of-breed systems were the standard. These solutions required systems to work together, yet few integrated easily, often exhausting carrier in-house resources, causing delays and depleting financial resources.

Worse yet, even integrated solutions often fell out of sync with installed and assigned inventories because they were disconnected from the "real" inventory - the network. Fulfillment process automation relies on valid and accurate data. As data inaccuracy increases, the overall effectiveness of the system decreases.

The ultimate result was slow and often inaccurate fulfillment that spawned lower revenues, customer dissatisfaction and churn.

Automated service fulfillment The new generation of OSSs is designed to interface easily and to automate service fulfillment. These systems streamline the design, provisioning and testing of new and existing circuits and services. The solutions also should be able to verify the accuracy of the data and resolve any inconsistencies. When this synchronization occurs, overall data integration can be maintained over time.

With this level of integration and synchronization, a service provider can take a customer order, design and configure the circuit, provision the network elements, activate the service and test the service before notifying the customer that their new service is available (Figure 2). This entire process is executed with minimal involvement of customer care or NOC personnel and few redundant data stores.

Automating critical business processes using integrated OSS solutions can be key to developing sustainable competitive advantage, and new OSSs can help service providers achieve this.

This integrated and automated solution frees a service provider from performing the following tasks manually:

- Provisioning network elements via vendor element management systems or via the network elements' native command line interface

- Validating a database of network element configurations

- Testing newly provisioned services

- Placing the network element ports in service

To automate these manual processes, a service provider can now enter the customer's work order into a software tool that leads to an OSS work flow management sub-system. This subsystem directs work through the order management, circuit design and service provisioning process. Activation requests containing the circuit layout record are passed to a network provisioning system. Using this circuit layout record, the system automatically interrogates each network element across a multivendor network in the circuit layout record to validate the availability of the equipment.

If a discrepancy exists between the circuit layout record and the network element's actual configuration, the activation request is rejected, and a discrepancy report is issued.When the circuit layout record is validated, the system automatically sends out the provisioning commands in the network elements' native language to activate services.

Upon completion of service provisioning, the software passes a test request with a circuit identifier to a test management OSS. In the background, this system tests the circuit end-to-end, using a pre-programmed script. The test management OSS then reports "pass" or "fail" results back to the software. In addition, the test management OSS immediately closes out work orders and, if necessary, launches a trouble ticket application.

All this is enabled by standard CORBA interfaces between the work order management subsystem, the network provisioning service activator and the test management OSS.

There are a number of attractive features for this solution:

- A single work flow process that handles order entry, network design, customer care, trouble management and service provisioning

- Real-time, flow-through provisioning

- One-step service provisioning through a single consistent user interface

- Simplified and faster order processing, accelerated rollout of new services, increased reliability and significantly reduced training and operating costs

- Network hardware independence with "best-of-breed" capability

- Visibility into the status and progress of service provisioning

- Seamless interfaces with other OSSs such as billing and sales force automation

New alliances Some companies have joined forces to address the challenges of OSS with an integrated service fulfillment solution. For example, one company's software may have a set of subsystems and modules integrated by a common repository of business data and processes to support the functional areas of a service provider's business: order management, service provisioning, network inventory and design, customer care, trouble management and work flow management. The software offers the capability to customize and automate these processes.

The other company might offer service provisioning and an activation management platform. Testing and monitoring can be integrated with the business processes associated with network provisioning and service activation.

Automated service fulfillment and assurance through new OSSs turns the seemingly impossible into the readily available. Service providers can reduce costs, accelerate revenue, improve customer turn-up lead times, reduce mean time to provisioning and focus key personnel on the business of making money.

With so many opportunities and so little time, the need for speed, flexibility and reliability are paramount. Today, order management, configuration, activation and testing can become a seamless, revenue-generating process that enables service providers to effectively compete in today's fast-paced, volatile market.