DOES PLM MAKE SENSE FOR SERVICE PROVIDERS?

If carriers need new platforms for delivering services — most likely in the form of still-emerging service delivery platforms — do they also need new platforms and processes for managing the service creation life cycle?

It's a question that has had its fits and starts in the service provider market. So-called product life cycle management (PLM) approaches are old hat in the physical products world. Manufacturers rely on sophisticated product design and manufacturing cycle management tools to help speed and automate new product development and delivery.

Some claim the same tools — fostering service, not physical product creation — are needed in the carrier market. The challenge for telecom is “to look at other industries and put their manufacturing and product — or in this case service — assembly concepts into action, in particular a centralized point of control, as well as more consistent product definitions and structures,” said Ari Banerjee, analyst for Yankee Group.

For service providers, PLM centers around the service or product “catalog,” which allows carriers to centralize product definitions in a common language, define the operations support systems/business support systems (OSS/BSS) rules for delivering service components and provide interfaces to all the stakeholders — from product managers to network administrators to front-office sales forces — to rapidly create and deliver new products.

OSS vendors such as Amdocs, Telcordia and others are pushing PLM-centric catalogs, while the TM Forum is working to drive PLM principles into next-generation OSS definitions, including a reference implementation currently under way at BT. “BT's idea is ‘Let's componentize our entire service factory,’” said Simon Osbourne, vice president of the Axiom product business unit for vendor Comptel, which helped lead the PSA project. “Let's try to manage the catalog with everything in it and build PLM layers on top of it.”