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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
newer term and typically refers to business systems dealing with
customers and support processes such as taking orders, processing bills,
collecting payments, sales and marketing, supporting customer care agents
in response to service requests, trouble reporting and billing inquiries, etc.
OSS and BSS systems together are often abbreviated as BSS/OSS or B/OSS.
The term OSS was historically used to include both network and business
systems. Some industry analysts, system integrators and service providers
still use the term OSS to include both network and business systems, which
sometimes causes confusion.
The article explains some of the basic functions of these systems. However,
this article doesn't intend to provide extensive details. For an extensive
overview of business activities, business process and functions, refer to
standards such as eTOM and TAM at http://www.tmforum.org/.
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
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
Tracking inventory involves tracking equipment, facilities and circuits.
Some examples of information tracked are: the location and quantities of the
equipment, how a piece of equipment is configured and its status, etc.
Inventory Management Systems track both the physical network assets
systems, both to verify that the required network elements and other
facilities are available, and once the resources are provisioned - to reflect the
changed on-line configuration of the facilities. Therefore, provisioning
systems have close channels with inventory systems. As a result, some
vendors have combined workflow capabilities with inventory management
capabilities in their products.
users, etc. Performance Management tools can access the data by using
SNMP to poll the MIBs at predefined intervals.
Statistics on performance variables can also be captured via dedicated
network appliances known such as probes and sniffers that monitor or
probe customers local loop connections, packet performance, etc. This form
of performance testing is usually referred to as active testing.
Packet sniffers typically monitor signaling protocols such as SIP and RTP by
inspecting packets on the wire/fiber, using pings, DNS, FTP, HTTP fetches,
etc. Examples include WireShark and Geoprobes.
Probes such as Brix Networks BrixWorks Verifiers and Tektronix/Minacom IVR
tools typically emulate customer traffic in order to test or probe specific
paths to measure the quality of the services supported. Probes could be
either placed into the network or could be built into network elements such
as in the case of Ciscos IP Service Level Agreements tools.
Note that active measurement measures a service, such as application
response time, instead of the internal operation of a network element.
An example of active network performance test is injecting ping (short,
network layer echo packet) into the network aimed at a remote IP address.
Round-trip time is measured if the ping packet returns, and an error counter
is incremented if it doesnt.
Performance statistics captured by active or passive performance tests
are normalized and routed to relational databases and/or data-warehouses.
An alternative is to pass the performance data directly to Performance
Management tools. For example, Concord eHealth could collect performance
statistics from Netcool agents via SNMP polls at a pre-defined interval.
Performance statistics are initially analyzed to determine the normal
include tests like DNS, HTTP, RTP, Ping, etc. Also, during ongoing operations,
these testing tools enable active testing of facilities.
Another form of testing is integration testing of network setup for the
customer, i.e., routes, circuits, etc. configured for a customer. Network
operators or field engineers perform integration testing of services upon
completion of activations and other provisioning activities. Field engineers
typically use equipment and network element specific applications to
perform integration testing.
Upon completion of integration testing, field operations teams are notified to
perform end-to-end testing. End-to-end testing includes testing of circuits,
both within the CSPs network as well as local access circuits between the
CSP and the customer premises. Some service providers use craft access
systems for the benefit of field technicians access to their internal systems
through a hand held terminal [5]. The hand held terminal helps them to
access loop testing system and to view the complete test summary from
remote locations.
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.