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Create a service-aware product catalogue. Just as other systems need to be aware of a new offer, the catalogue also needs to be aware of new capabilities in the network and other parts of the CSP as they are brought online. This involves removing the knowledge of offer, product and service-specific parameters from the fulfillment systems and moving this knowledge into the catalogue. This enables time-to-market and also simplifies business logic within all systems. This reduces operating costs and fall-out, and increases customer satisfaction.
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Introduce a standards-based order management platform. TMF’s shared Information and Data Model (SID) and other standardized interface specifications reflect both industry best practices, and also reduce the integration friction between OSS and BSS systems.
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Adopt a policy-based, service-agnostic, approach to service fulfillment. Standardize fulfillment workflow activities across service types, while allowing for varied network element managers involved for each service. For example, the contracts involved in fulfillment should be “reserveResource” and “activateResource” rather than distinct implementations by service, e.g. “activateIPTV”. The catalogue specification provides the contract details, and a policy engine provides the end-point selection by service.
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Rationalize product offerings and fulfillment strategies. Steps 1 through 4 lay the groundwork for the longer-term challenge of refactoring the fulfillment strategies in legacy silos to leverage the new framework. The goal: a unified sales experience that provides the same view of product and services regardless of whether the order arrives through a web portal, CSR, mobile device, retail store, or other channel. The choice of channel should not impact the user’s ability to order what they want, when they want it, and how they want it delivered. This is a step that, depending upon the size of the challenge, may never reach completion. Nevertheless, tremendous gains in operational efficiency can be had solely by tackling the low hanging fruit.
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Offer structured order views: The Order Management platform needs to provide visibility not only into single order – single service status, but into a project world where VPNs are being established for a single client across hundreds of orders, each of which is interrelated, and each of which may contain a number of services to be fulfilled.
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Offer full “enterprise self care” services, including post-order management. As Stratecast’s McNeice said above, ordering consists of three phases, yet the post-order timeframe is often neglected from a customer care point of view. Customers need visibility and control over orders after they are placed. To accomplish this, break down fulfillment steps into individually orchestrateable blocks that can then be managed through resequencing the activities, adding dependencies and notifications, and managing jeopardizes by varying the standard production flows. Ensure that your order management platform is capable of accepting real-time changes to individual workflow execution.
As I flew back from my trip to California, an airline snafu assigned me to the last seat of the plane: a cramped seat in the economy section. Unable to open my laptop, and hungry from the lack of meal service, I was left to think more about the compromises that some businesses have to make to cut costs low enough to appeal to a high-volume market. Sore from my long trip, I landed with a renewed determination to help my CSP customers offer the very best possible services to the largest possible group of customers.
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