Internal Bottlenecks

Although incumbent local exchange carriers would love to dig up and discard their overgrown, outdated provisioning systems, they must use a number of specialty solutions so those systems can meet next generation demands.

A study says that carriers receive 65% of wholesale service orders manually. To avoid getting buried, more of them are turning to automation.

Technology Research Institute, Sudbury, Mass., surveyed major U.S. carriers and key provisioning suppliers about the difficulties involved in transforming the industry. The report, "Wholesale billing, provisioning and OSS interconnect systems," reveals a multitude of steps that incumbent carriers should take to cut workers out of the process.

Indeed, competitive LECs continually are prodding incumbent carriers to deliver more efficient electronic bonding to speed the flow of provisioning orders.

Electronic bonding is implemented via an operations support system (OSS) gateway. On a basic level, an OSS gateway operates as a super-efficient mailroom clerk, sorting forms and envelopes into hundreds of mail bins. The measure of success is how quickly and accurately these myriad forms are routed.

A CLEC ordering the resale of a single local circuit needs to process at least 10 forms, starting with either a customer service request or an access service request.

TRI's study reveals that carriers are gravitating toward industry standard forms in two areas: local number portability and primary interexchange carriers. But some forms such as claims, adjustments and disconnect orders probably will continue to be developed in-house, survey respondents reported.

Automation on the way The typical incumbent receives the majority of forms manually, either via a customer service representative, fax transmission or electronic tape. Based on a survey of carrier executives, TRI estimates that in 1997, roughly 65% of wholesale service orders were received via such manual methods.

However, automation appears to be on the way.

In 1999, these same carriers project that as many as 83% of their service orders will be automated, which will reduce the administrative overhead.

Gateways may do a fine job sending along order forms, but the chief bottleneck is in getting automated flowthrough past the incumbent carrier's downstream provisioning systems (Table 1).

Pacific Bell, for instance, lets CLECs access its service order retrieval and distribution system, the carrier's primary order input system that handles both residential and business customers. However, fewer than one-third of the provisioning orders passing through the system are automated.

But CLEC executives who insist on across-the-board provisioning automation miss the point: Legacy OSSs were designed to be operated by human beings. Machine interfaces to many services simply don't exist.

In fact, the incumbents' engineers rightly argue that spending enormous amounts to automate everything would be as foolish as spending too little on needed automation.

Moreover, the legacy provisioning systems support procedures that took hundreds of years to evolve, such as undocumented business rules, ways of processing transactions and methods of handling customer orders.

Technicians scroll through multiple IBM 3270 terminal screens, first to locate customer service records and then to coordinate dozens of tasks on a dozen provisioning systems.

In other words, the wherewithal to keep those systems operating resides in the heads of the engineers who work with them every day. Fully documenting that knowledge to make it understandable to an outside telco's engineers would be a herculean feat.

Originally, telcos maintained their vast provisioning infrastructures using in-house engineers exclusively. In the past decade, though, third-party OSS integrators have been used increasingly.

The market for provisioning solutions and integration reached $850 million in 1997, with firms like Bellcore, Andersen Consulting and Beechwood Data Systems leading the pack.

Provisioning integrators maintain a vast library of telco objects-software driver-like code that sends out alarms, gathers performance statistics and, in general, enables a telco to configure switches and other network elements remotely to meet customer requirements.

The integrators rarely sell a product per se. Instead, they build each new project from an object framework, a reusable toolkit of code, data structures, methodologies and domain knowledge accumulated from dozens of earlier integration projects.

To provision an intelligent network service-call routing, call waiting, voice mail or calling cards-a telco system first modifies a subscriber's profile located in a service control point (SCP) server or intelligent peripheral such as a voice mail system.

Then the anguish begins. The element management system embedded in the SCP or intelligent peripheral is often incompatible with the carrier's provisioning systems.

In addition, unique parameters must be set up for each service. Number-based services such as call waiting or call forwarding share little in common with voice mail services.

To close the gap, vendors build mediation systems that read the appropriate account information taken from the subscriber database, then provision the intelligent network elements as required.

A mediation system offers another important benefit: The service order interface remains stable as new generations of provisioning are integrated.

Software puts brains into the network The task of provisioning data services has always required knowledgeable engineers.

Turning on a customer's data service automatically requires configuration changes in multiple network management systems. For decades, human operators made the changes because only they understood the context of an order and could troubleshoot if necessary. But a human operator can handle only a few change requests per hour.

Another bottleneck in the way of automating the data provisioning process is that a system must not only be intelligent enough to activate data service orders but must be able to roll back or delete changes for orders that fail to make their way through the provisioning pipeline.

Another important provisioning problem revolves around service availability-knowing exactly where network elements are located, both logically and geographically.

Every time a CLEC needs to lease a local circuit from an incumbent, the CLEC essentially is buying bandwidth in the incumbent's network. For this reason, it's vital that a CLEC maintain an accurate network inventory picture when it designs the flow of a customer's circuit across on-network or off-network elements.

On-network means serving a customer within its own network. Off-network implies that at least a portion of the call will go over a leased facility.

Many carriers today store their network reference data on circuits, facilities and equipment with different databases that tend not to be integrated with one another. No wonder network operators report that facilities databases can err 10% to 20% of the time. Typically, to fulfill a particular service, network engineers are forced to assign equipment and route facilities manually.

For a Bell company, replacing the legacy trunk integrated record-keeping system in one fell swoop may be an impractical solution to this inventory problem. Several smaller carriers and cable TV operators, on the other hand, can resort to software vendors that specialize in network inventory solutions.

Vendors now supply software tools that give carriers a framework for documenting plant and transmission facilities via a common engineering database.

Using one company's network inventory software, for example, GTE's design engineers can access graphical views of their Sonet ring network topology. They can use the software to create, name and provision those rings automatically while maintaining a dynamic view of the ring's capacity.

No matter how automated provisioning operations may get, telcos will always need technicians to climb telephone poles in the field and replace circuit boards in switching offices (Table 2).

Of course, every technician out on the road represents an investment in repair truck, tools and training. Pacific Bell's technician work force, for instance, numbers about 10,000.

The trend toward carrier interconnection will make work force management an even tougher job, especially as local telcos unbundle their services. What a telco previously accomplished with one of its own field technicians, for example, might now require the coordination of field personnel from three companies.