Order-to-Service Needs Automation with a Soul

Jeanne Smith, Director of Product Management, Telcordia

Speed to market takes foresight and commitment, especially when offering multi-play services. These services are becoming more complex as the underlying market trends, cultural/societal behaviors and technologies evolve. Current order-to-service approaches are having difficulty dealing with data inconsistencies and fragmented and disconnected processes. Automation can help, but only if it takes into consideration the increasingly dynamic nature of multi-play services.

Automation focuses on processes that are rule-driven and, ideally, follow best practices. Best practices represent the soul of efficient operations. In the case of multi-play service provisioning, these best practices are not static when it comes to designing and assigning increasingly fluid service and network resources. Design and assign functions cover the lifecycle of assigning circuits and services in the inventory system through build, change, complete, cancel and rework processes, and drive the resulting work orders and activation processes. Given the critical role design and assign best practices play in optimizing order-to-service process, these functions should be the initial target of any automation effort.

At the core of this design and assign effort should be an extensible automation framework. This framework should use available design and assign best practices to drive the creation of process templates that automate the complex provisioning flows required by multi-play services. Best practices should address operational efficiency – reusing resources when processing service changes and corrections, rearranging facilities when replacing or upgrading equipment, reserving resources for special cases, processing rework, etc. They should also accommodate an increasingly mobile technician force with the need to access and make changes from the field. As mentioned before, these services are extremely dynamic. The automation framework must accommodate this by providing extensible templates that not only support new services, but also subsequent revisions. By combining automation and best practices templates, the order-to-service process now has the intelligence and soul needed to deliver the business benefits imagined for multi-play services in the first place.

One immediate benefit that comes from the adoption of a best practice-driven automation framework is consistency across all the service and technology domains involved in the offering of multi-play services. The entire organization can benefit from the latest knowledge and expertise. This consistency also results in a more cohesive order-to-service environment with faster processing times. The goal is to maximize service provisioning flowthrough ensuring error-free and accurate handling of any number of disparate network resources needed to support the variety of network designs that usually arise from multi-play service offerings. Achieving this goal reduces provisioning costs, frees up staff to concentrate on growth initiatives, and provides the context to collectively capture, preserve and develop critical order-to-service best practices throughout the enterprise.

For more information, please contact Jeanne Smith, Director of Product Management, Telcordia at jsmith2@telcordia.com or visit our website.