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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.
1. Introduction
Before the initial 1970s, most of the support activities in a telephone
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.
2.1.1 Order Management
Order Management systems are complex systems that allow customer or
customer service representatives to capture and process new orders, modify
existing orders, process customer moves and changes, price quotes and
orders, validate orders, etc., while supporting multiple channels such as
Web, Order template documents and partner applications as well as multiple
lines of businesses.
Order Management includes the following areas:
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
problem.
Performance Management tools then measure the performance variables
against SLAs defined as thresholds per application or service, on an on-going
basis. In case of exceptions they report them to alarm handlers. This form of
performance monitoring is reactive performance monitoring. Some tools also
support proactive monitoring by way of providing simulation tools that helps
network operators project how growth in network traffic will affect
performance metrics and plan to take proactive countermeasures such as
increase capacity.
Performance Management tools may also support real-time and historical
reporting. Some CSPs have taken performance statistics of the network
affecting customers circuits to their customer self-service portals.
2.2.3. Topology & Configuration Management
Older networks and systems were static and the network wiring was fixed in
place, and sometimes required long outages while changes to the network
and its configuration were being made. Any error or inconsistency in the
configuration files of different network devices caused problem, and
therefore these changes were well controlled [3].
According to [3], with the rise of IP-based, dynamically routed networks,
network topologies started becoming dynamic. The topology of the network
became dynamic because a few of routers might decide, on their own, to
shift routing patterns, or because a network operator group might add a new
router or switch to the network, possibly without everyone else in the
network operations center being aware of the changes. Instead of static
associations between users and network addresses (as was set in the old
hosts file), DHCP and other techniques allowed users to appear, move, and
disappear without providing prior notice to the network administration.
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
service assurance in production environments [4].
Network testing tools usually simulate a production environment and
generate synthetic voice, video and data traffic, which helps measure
call/data quality, network performance, and the affects of any changes to the
network or increasing traffic or adding new applications. These tests typically
include tests like DNS, HTTP, RTP, Ping, etc. Also, during ongoing operations,
these testing tools enable active testing of facilities.
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.