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Management
After order entry, validation and submission, orders are decomposed and
sent for provisioning. Upon fulfilling the decomposed orders and appropriate
testing of the circuits, the orders are put into inventory. The following subsections explain the Order Fulfillment related functions and OSS/BSS
systems.
One of the major problems service providers often grapple with is that, as
new services are added to the offerings, led by different business units, the
lack of flexible order management platform results in product/service specific
OSS/BSS applications. These in turn result in higher time-to-market as well
as increased costs of maintaining many different applications and systems.
Product catalog based Order Management solutions attempt to solve these
problems by storing and processing qualification rules for services based on
customer profiles, ordering channels, service locations, product
interdependencies, availability, customer eligibility and other business
constraints.
2.1.2 Service Provisioning
Service Provisioning systems are systems used to setup products/services
for the customer after an order for the services has been created and
accepted by the CSP.
Service provisioning activities include specifying the pieces of equipment and
parts of the network to fulfill the service, configuring the customers routing
path, allocation of bandwidth in the transport network, setting up of wiring
and transmission, etc.
Some of the systems that constitute provisioning systems are: Circuit Design
& Assignment Tools, Activation systems, and Field Service Management
systems.
Circuit design refers to specifying whether facilities exist to provide the
service and which pieces of the network equipment and routes the service
shall utilize.
One of the most widely used systems providing Circuit Design facility is
Telcordia TIRKS. Apart from Circuit Design support, it also provides circuit
order control, inventory record maintenance, selection and assignment of
components from inventory, and preparation and distribution of circuit work
orders. The order control module in TIRKS works with a circuit provisioning
system and operates in conjunction with other TIRKS components to assign
facility and equipment information for circuit orders and design circuits.
TIRKS can then provide automated design criteria for certain circuit orders.
The circuit design generated in TIRKS is then communicated to field
operations or automated activation systems for implementation.
Circuit Design and Assignment tools these days often have graphical tools
that allow a user to create services on a network map using mouse clicks
and drag-and-drop rather than drawing maps by hand or using an abstract
set of equipment identifiers displayed in a table.
After a service is designed based on the existing equipment and circuit
inventory, it is ready to be activated. If new equipment or lines need to be
configured manually, a Field Service Management (FSM) system is notified
which in turn dispatches technicians.
Moreover, certain activations can be performed automatically. For example,
issuing commands to ATM or circuit switches to provision circuits, to SONET
terminals to allocate bandwidth, and to a wide array of access devices such
as DSLAMS, Digital Loop Carriers (DLC), or cable modems. For such
activations, Service Activation systems pass the device specific commands
2.3 Inventory Management
System that in turn logs the problem and issues a trouble ticket to start the
repair process.
The Trouble Management System then sends commands to appropriate
systems such as Field Service Management to schedule and dispatch
technicians to repair the equipment and/or to EMS to reroute network traffic
around the problem areas.
Trouble Management systems also handle automatic escalation, such as
progression of a ticket from minor to major or major to critical, etc., and
support a variety of notification methods such as paging, emails, synthesis
voice dial-out.
Fault Management systems usually provide graphical network displays which
are projected on large screens at the Network Operations Centres (NOC).
NOC operators can see role-based views on their consoles, shortcuts to
operations they perform the most as well as tools to quickly make
connections to EMS to perform any testing or diagnostic operation.
2.2.2 Network Performance Management
Performance Management components in NMS and other Alarm Handlers
monitor applications and systems and collect performance variables of
interest at specified intervals. Performance variables of interest may be
service provider network edge availability, customer premises availability,
response times, packet delivery rate, packet losses, latencies, jitters and out
of sequence packet reorder, etc., to name a few.
One way to capture performance metrics is collecting event logs, CDRs and
other performance data such as counters or timers that the network and
system elements maintain as part of their normal operation. This is referred
to as passive measurement. Performance data is captured by polling MIB
using SNMP or using syslog, (I & II), FTP, EMS feeds, etc. Most passive
equipment, tracking the changes manually would be very tedious and errorprone. Configuration Management tools help automates the tracking of the
changes. Configuration Management systems store the configurations in a
database or LDAP server for easy access.
They also enable network operators to change configurations of the network
elements as well as to roll back a change to a previous configuration, if
required.
When a problem in the network occurs, network operators often search the
Configuration Management database for clues that can help solve the
problem.
2.2.4. Planning & Testing
Network Planning solutions help determine when a communication network
needs an upgrade or additional equipment as well as to predict the impact of
changes to a service providers networks topology, configuration, traffic and
technology. They provide simulation tools that help the network operators to
project how growth in network traffic will affect the network performance.
Based on the results and other planning activities, network operators can
take countermeasures such as increase capacity.
Testing is an important activity in setting up a network or customer circuits.
For simplicity in understanding the gamut of testing activities, let us divide
them into the following:
1. Testing of existing network or a change
2. Integration testing of services configured for the customer
3. End-to-end testing of services configured for the customer
Testing the entire network platform - including the equipment, services and
call quality is critical for assessing the system prior to deployment and for
2.3 Billing
IDC [6] defines Billing as: the processing and compiling of charges and
enabling of revenue collection for network usage, feature transactions, and
access charges of the services.Mediation systems collect network usage data
from the network elements and convert to billable statistics.
The following figure depicts a simple Billing flow:
Traditionally, for phone calls, Call Detail Records (CDR) have been used to
record the details of the circuit-switched phone call. CDR includes
information on start time of call, end time of call, duration of call, originating
and termination numbers. CDRs are stored until a billing cycle runs. For IP
Based Services, a new standard is gaining acceptance called Internet
Protocol Detail Record (IPDR). IPDR supports both voice and data.
Billing systems use mediation output to determine charges for the
customers. It is also used to feed other downstream applications such as
Fraud and Churn Management.
2.3.2 Rating
Rating systems calculate the charge for an individual call, IP usage event,
etc. using the CDRs/IPDRs. Rating systems apply charges based on preconfigured pricing rules, applicable discounts and rebates from promotions.
This rating process has grown increasingly complex in recent years. In older
times, it was solely a matter of taking the length of the call, assigning a
price based on the mileage band (calculated by cross-referencing the prefix
of the originating and terminating numbers in a table of values), and
assigning discounts based on the time of day (peak, evening, night), day of
3. Conclusion
3.1 Summary
OSS/BSS systems and applications automate many of the day to day
operations performed in a communications service providers operating
environment. They optimize the time taken to perform these operations and
make the business processes more efficient.
There are no all-encompassing OSS/BSS systems that can be installed,
integrated, tested and allow the service providers to easily modernize their
end-to-end operations functions.
Service providers, therefore, use all the different approaches: best-of-breed
in some areas, off-the-shelf in some, and home-grown custom applications
in the remaining areas, to modernize and optimize their operations.
More often than not, many of these OSS/BSS systems are integrated with
the others in a point-to-point fashion, as part of discrete projects and
programs, sponsored out of different business units. This leads to point-topoint integration of OSS/BSS systems unless the programs/projects are
planned with a strategic goal.
A side effect of the difficulty in integrating the various OSS/BSS systems is
many of the OSS/BSS systems in a service providers operating environment
may not be integrated at all. For example, it is not unusual to find the
following scenario: when a customer orders a new telephone line, the
ordering system takes the details of a customers order, but a manual
process is present to configure the telephone exchange using a switch
management system. Details of the order entered in the Order Handling
system is re-keyed manually by the technician into the Switch Management
System a process often referred to as Swivel-Chair Integration.
The article provided an overview of some of the core OSS/BSS areas in
Order Fulfillment, Service Assurance and Billing.