Apr 1, 2001 12:00 PM,

Revisiting Flow-Through

Deborah Young, Revenue-Management Editor

Can you benefit from the end-to-end automation of your provisioning system? And what network challenges must you endure if you take the plunge?

Why Automate?

As the variety of wireless services increases, the networks become more complex, and more network elements need to be provisioned.

“We've seen that provisioning to one type of network system is no longer the case,” said John Konczal, Telution (www.telution.com) vice president of product marketing.

According to Konczal, the advent of wireless data services has complicated the flow-through provisioning process because data-service provisioning involves extracting data from content gateways as well as network switches.

In addition, various new technologies, as well as the proliferation of mergers and acquisitions, have resulted in a hodge-podge of network elements co-existing under one corporate umbrella. For example, a carrier might have decided its 2G, 2.5G and 3G provisioning. Then the carrier merges with another company and inherits multivendor network equipment. To avoid an unmanageable collection of divergent and incompatible network systems, the new entity must integrate some, if not all, of the systems.

“Delivering wireless service is much more complex than most other telecommunications services out there today, because it's such a combination of heterogeneous services that all need to be handled uniquely,” Konczal said.

According to Konczal, Telution's wireless clients are responding to today's market demands by focusing on automating everything from workflow management to order fulfillment and inventory management.

“Flow-through provisioning is actually a number of complicated tasks that need to be managed,” he said.

In the old voice days, consumers went to a store, bought a phone and put down a security deposit. The carrier would provision to the network and, voilá, the customer had voice service, Konczal said. Those days are gone with the advent of Blackberry-type devices and the Compaq iPaq, which allow customers to go into stores and order the device with myriad services, complicating the flow-through provisioning process.

Adding enterprise applications to the mix increases those complexities. Most of Telutions' wireless-carrier customers provide vehicle location services and asset-tracking services for enterprises. The carriers' devices are affixed to vehicles such as trucks and trains to provide statistics about the vehicles' condition and the average travel speed to help locate stolen vehicles.

“To those types of (carriers), flow-through provisioning also means handling inventory and shipping maybe hundreds of wireless devices at one time and making sure that they're all activated when they're shipped,” Konczal said. “Flow-through provisioning is being considered as all of the processes around activating the network that you need to deliver service.”

Konczal is not alone in his assessment of how recent industry trends are creating a need to rethink the approach to flow-through provisioning. Representatives from NetCracker (www.netcracker.com), Nortel Networks (www.nortel.com), Telcordia, Lucent (www.lucent.com) and Bridge-water Systems agree that market changes are making end-to-end automation an important consideration (www.bridgewatersystems.com).

“There needs to be something that can take all of the different knowledge about all of the different (network) pieces and incorporate that into real-time delivery,” said Julie Wingerter, NetCracker vice president of strategy. “The proliferation of technology in the wireless space, the growth of the networks and the need to track components of the network and have an accurate understanding of the network picture is critical, particularly as there's more competition these days.”

Telcordia's (www.telcordia.com) Grant Lenahan doesn't like to apply the term flow-through provisioning to wireless, because he views it as a wireline term. Instead, Lenahan, Telcordia's director of mobility solutions, prefers the terms automated service activation and automated network management.

“Even though mobile phones don't need classic provisioning in terms of assigning a loop, it's becoming extremely cumbersome to grow networks as fast as they're growing,” Lenahan said.

Capacity increases, as well as an increase in subscribers, are creating major challenges in terms of planning, engineering and documenting network changes and maintaining the software parameters associated with each radio in a carrier's network, Lenahan said. Telcordia is working with the Telemanagement Forum's (www.tmforum.org) Mobile Common Configuration Management Initiative to define methods of automating the planning, engineering and configuration processes to meet carriers' future network- and service-management needs.

The eventual migration to 3G networks also is creating questions about how flow-through provisioning can be handled more efficiently, as well as how systems should be designed so that they won't be obsolete in the near future.

“As you move into the more advanced service — mobile music and video clipping and so on — the number of devices that need to be network-intelligent are going to increase,” said Justin Brown, Nortel Networks director for 3G wireless in the service provider e-business solutions team. “That's creating a fundamental re-evaluation within our customer base as to how they do provisioning moving into 3G.”

For carriers involved in wholesale, the need to control resellers' network activities adds another aspect to flow-through provisioning, according to Andrew Taylor, Lucent software sales manager for emerging wireless accounts.

According to these vendor reps, flow-through provisioning decreases the time involved in activating customers, enables carriers to deploy new features and services more quickly and, because it decreases the manpower necessary to run the system, ultimately decreases operational costs. Other reported rewards include reducing errors by reducing human contact and improving network efficiency by providing a clear and accurate view of the network.

The Challenges

One of the biggest challenges of automating your service- and network-management processes is to select or build a system that works. Vendors place the cost of implementing a flow-through provisioning system from about $500,000 for small carriers with a couple of simple processes to millions of dollars.

“We know firsthand of some carriers that spent $200 million trying to build their own in-house system to do this, and they're scrapping it,” said NetCracker's Wingerter.

Telution's Konczal uses a DSL business example to illustrate the point. He said DSL providers have suffered financial losses because of failures within their flow-through provisioning systems. Konczal said the failures were caused by systems that did not integrate various network elements. The result was increased service-development cycles while the carriers mulled which tasks would be involved in provisioning to various network elements. Konczal said the providers wound up doing many tasks manually, which increased their time to market.

As an example of the kinds of things that can go wrong as a result of inadequate planning, Konczal cited the specifics of one DSL carrier's flow-through provisioning failure.

“Let's say they were trying to provision a specific switch, and the transaction failed because the correct data wasn't there,” Konczal said. “The order would fail, and it would show up on a customer-service representative's desktop. If you're a CSR that's trying to process 150 orders a day, the last thing that you're going to look at is orders in error. So the fallout rate and the delay time for orders that were in error for this carrier were like 120 or 150 days.”

To alleviate this kind of problem, a flow-through provisioning system should include automated error-management functions, Konczal said. Managing errors means specifying who should be notified of errors and providing a way for those individuals to correct them automatically.

Konczal's example illustrates the importance of integrating tasks and processes so that one hand knows what the other is doing. Telcordia's Lenahan offers a similar view.

“You could think of planning, engineering, configuring, then dealing with fault and performance management as separate tasks,” Lenahan said. “But if you did that, you would wind up putting the same information into quite a few applications. Ultimately, they would wind up corrupted.”

To avoid data corruption, Lenahan recommends building a system that flows information from one application to another so that there is communication between all applications. For example, information from the planning process would flow to engineering then to inventory management, configuration, QoS management and fault management.

According to Lenahan, Telcordia is working with two carriers to help them automate network planning. The process involves an engineer working with market-forecasting personnel to produce a detailed view of anticipated subscriber growth. Automated software helps the engineer create a map of the network and provide the information to other applications so the companies can maintain a database of network equipment and capacity, as well as radio parameters.

System Evolution

Verizon Wireless's flow-through provisioning system was created during the 1980s, but after numerous modifications, it's really a different system than it was back then, according to Nick Arcuri, Verizon Wireless director of business support systems (www.verizonwireless.com).

According to Arcuri, what's changed most is the number and size of the applications with which the provisioning system communicates. Along with platforms such as a WAP gateway, the system communicates with Verizon's recently introduced over-the-air activation system, which allows handsets to be activated or programmed remotely.

Another change has to do with mergers and acquisitions.

“We've picked up a number of provisioning systems,” Arcuri said. “Some are still tied into billing systems, but we've put together a strategy to converge one or two systems, and that strategy is being executed.”

One of the greatest benefits of flow-through provisioning is that it enables companies to deploy new features and services quickly.

“With the types of sales that we're doing, I think it'd be nearly impossible to support a manual process,” he said.

However, Arcuri said that he believes some carriers still are using manual processes. He attributes this to the introduction of many new technologies and the pressure on carriers to roll out services quickly. If a carrier doesn't have a flow-through provisioning system, this work must be done manually.

Service orders at Verizon flow from the point-of-sale system to the billing system then to the provisioning system, called the mobile telephone activation system (MTAS). MTAS provisions the service on the necessary network elements.

After the service is provisioned, a positive acknowledgement is sent back from the network elements involved for confirmation. Each department in the chain receives the acknowledgement, all the way back to customer service and sales.

The way the process works at Verizon is that as the marketing department plans to offer new services, it considers how to handle provisioning and billing, as well as how to track data relative to the new service once it's deployed. Although the planning period varies from project to project, Arcuri said market demands usually dictate that the process be completed quickly, sometimes within weeks of the service roll-out date.

For example, Verizon Wireless had to deploy its mobile Web offering quickly. A requirements document detailing pertinent information about the mobile Web service was issued to various groups involved in the product roll-out, and each team created a project plan. Arcuri's group handled provisioning issues relative to the introduction of the Web service.

“We had to start communicating with a network platform that we hadn't been communicating with, in this case the Phone.com WAP gateway,” Arcuri explained.

Because a new network element was introduced, Arcuri's team had to obtain specifications about the tasks involved in attaching to the gateway and find out what messages needed to be provisioned.

According to Arcuri, the planning process usually involves designing, coding, testing and development, unit testing and, finally, user-acceptance testing. The costs include development expenses and expenses to maintain the flow-through provisioning hardware and software.

External Solutions

The vendor community is realizing the importance of software that is compatible with various vendors' OSS and BSS software and that can integrate various business processes.

Telution is addressing the need for a flexible architecture with XML.

“A lot of the companies that we're talking to are trying to figure out a way to use XML, because it seems like one data-exchange tool that you can find a lot of developers for today,” said Telution's Konczal. “So it's the one thing that we're trying to standardize on. A lot of the wireless carriers that we're talking to are also using XML, or variations thereof, over their wireless networks to deliver content to devices. So it seems like a natural fit.”

Netcracker's flow-through provisioning product is Web-based, which Wingerter said gives it an open architecture and scaleability.

“We track both the physical and logical inventory,” she said. “So we know not only how many different switches you have but also how much bandwidth you've got available.”

Telcordia's software also is designed to support multivendor networks.

Lucent's Kenan Mobile Suite manages the integration of several network- and service-management processes, including billing, customer care, provisioning, fault management, network optimization and inventory management.