By Laurie Spiegel, 12 March, 2014.
Let the Catalog Drive Lead-to
-Service Efficiency
Every telecom business process can be called “mission-critical.” But given the world in which we find ourselves, lead-to-service has
to be the process that keeps operators up at night. That’s because, in every market around the world, services are king, and it is
the amalgam of processes known as lead-to-service – lead conversion and order capture through to validation, testing, processing,
configuration, provisioning and error handling – that gets services to customers.
As customers have become more demanding and services more complex, operators are discovering that the traditional approach
to fulfilling subscriber orders simply isn’t good enough anymore. To enable product differentiation, and gain the agility needed to
succeed against competitors, service providers are implementing a central product catalog to address their lead-to-service issues.
These issues will vary to some degree from operator to operator. But there are several that are fairly universal. As you will see, a
component-based product catalog, combined with the right approach to its implementation, can solve the issues and streamline
the entire lead-to-service process.
Eliminating multiple IT stacks
Using a classical approach that has worked for decades, operators have deployed individual technology stacks for each line of
business. When a small number of service offerings were the norm, this was not really a problem. But with today’s expanding
array of personalized services and complex bundles that contain third-party components, this approach is increasingly becoming
impossible to deploy, and even more difficult to maintain.
Separate stacks mean that an operator cannot combine offerings. For example, a customer subscribing to IPTV and mobile
services from the same service provider is seen as two separate customers by the organization. Problems in ordering and
customer management crop up due to lack of a converged view of service information. With a federated catalog, different services
are no longer different lines of business. They can be bundled into a single offering in any combination – one customer, one order,
one bill, one invoice.
Separate stacks also mean that intelligence is distributed to support new product offerings comprised of operator resources in
combination with those from partners and suppliers. However, with the increase in the number and complexity of offerings, frequent
changes to them and the demand for personalization, this intelligence now has to be readily available for reuse in creating new
offerings. It makes sense to drive micro workflows from the product catalog, which can be assembled into an end-to-end workflow
in real time when a customer orders the service. This fosters consistency among all related offerings and ensures accurate order
decomposition. The resulting workflow is completely tuned to the resource and service configurations involved, including those that
rely on third-party service providers for activation. It is invisible to the customer, but crucial to the customer experience.
Harmonizing product data
When no single system is the steward of every facet of product information, lack of harmonized data will infiltrate the entire lifecycle
of the order, from sales enquiry through fulfillment. For example, physical resources are configured and mastered in the resource
inventory management system. Corresponding logical resources such as phone numbers may be configured and mastered in
another system. This is expected, as multiple types of resources are required to fulfill an order. So to perform at scale, multiple
supporting systems are needed.
When relationships between these sets of data are not properly established, errors persist in order fulfillment, and crop up in
downstream systems. Even with mobile services, where the role of physical resources is more limited, it is just as important to
harmonize the data between the systems that define the product and those that specify the service requirements. For example,
commercial product information with its pricing and contractual terms needs to be harmonized between the sales and billing
systems. Assurance systems also need to be informed of the service quality models to be used in monitoring the service. Each of
these areas is of equal importance in meeting customer expectations.
An all too common scenario is one where marketing decides to add a new product variant into the portfolio. However, the marketing
personnel do not get the proper technical information, including network resource requirements, to the department in charge of
service configuration, nor the proper commercial information to billing. So, when a customer order is placed, rework leads to delays,
and poor communication to unintended billing errors.
A catalog that automatically links commercial products
with the technical services and subtending resources
that are required to fulfill that service ensures that data
is harmonized. If you federate the information from a
centralized data store and automatically propagate
it wherever it is needed, all changes are made in all
effected applications.
Taking this concept a step further, you can have the
downstream systems dynamically call on the catalog
to provide relevant information at the exact time it is
needed. For example, as margins from consumer
services shrink, enterprise customers have become
ever more attractive to operators. But complex enterprise
orders involve a longer quotation time, and the lack of
dynamic pricing can slow the negotiation process
significantly. If the enterprise account manager has to make a pricing change or invoke a discount, that change must be made in
the sales application and all other relevant downstream databases must be informed – charging, rating and billing.
With catalog-driven dynamic pricing, the account manager has the flexibility to add new pricing and billing rules on the fly. All
information is seamlessly consumed by downstream applications during the order negotiation phase. When the customer places
the order, they get billed at the proper rate from day one.
This is the essence of a catalog-driven lead-to-service approach that ensures consistency in every service-related business process.
How it’s done is just as important as doing it
Addressing lead-to-service issues successfully is very much
about how a catalog solution is implemented. Adopting a
central product master – whether it’s a single common system
or federated from subtending catalogs – then publishing its
information to composite applications on demand will change
how the organization goes about its work. This is especially
true for groups outside of the IT domain, like the product
management team.
Success in implementing a centralized catalog relies on taking
a holistic approach to solution implementation, and best
practices dictate an end-to-end assessment of all products,
related services and their technical resource requirements.
Extending the view to all related information can become quite
complex in areas like channel-specific pricing and ordering
rules. It is also important to see beyond order fulfillment
functions and take an extended perspective, from customer
care to assurance and billing. It may be prudent to take a step
back and decide to centrally model only next-generation services.
This assessment takes expertise in product/service/resource
modeling. How are the services configured within the network
elements? How are the resources mastered within the
resource management system? How do the products get
bundled into an offer, taking into account the myriad of characteristics corresponding to the service and the specifications relevant
to the resources? Further, how do you do it while defining the commercial components of the offer?
Efficient catalog implementation takes an understanding of how the pieces add up to become a marketable offer, that can be
customized and personalized using appropriate ordering, provisioning and activation chains. This calls for an intimate familiarity
with the entire lead-to-service cycle and how it can be streamlined by conforming to industry standards and best practices.
An implementation informed by all of the above will enable the operator to offer a truly convergent portfolio of product offerings.
Experience has proven that this approach leads to greater long-term benefits.
Components at the core
A component-based product catalog has been proven time and
again in real-world operator environments. Functional specifications,
rule references and workflow identifiers are embedded in unique
product/service/resource components to ensure that each process
executes consistently and accurately within defined timelines.
Rather than distributing the role of product development across
multiple resources, a component-based approach enables a single,
non-IT user to define new products and offers without complex
software development or extensive coordination across work
groups. Components are defined by IT with input from engineering,
operations, billing, and others to ensure that ordering and fulfillment
rules are correct and that rules pertaining to connectivity and
compatibility of each component are specified. Once those
components are made available to the product catalog, any
authorized user, including an external third party, can construct a
product, assign pricing and create an offer by grouping and layering
them in combinations that, together, define a product offering.
Components and their combinations can be used, reused, modified
and further combined in nearly limitless arrangements, but the basic
building blocks remain a constant – affording consistency both
commercially and technically.
This approach results in faster time to market and consistency in all product offerings. It also eliminates order errors through
accurate alignment of an offer’s commercial aspects with its technical counterparts. Unless a single catalog and consistent data
are driving every channel, it is virtually guaranteed that service providers will be unable to rapidly define and accurately deliver new
products to market without damaging the customer experience, creating errors, and increasing cost.
Summary
Throughout our industry, all operators are feeling the heat to push out services that are getting extraordinarily complex, more
dynamic, personalized, multidimensional and nonlinear – and to deliver them fast. Turning up the heat even higher, competing
operators and third-party developers, marketers, advertisers and content providers are also pushing out new offerings through
target marketing and promotions.
Just how fast do offers need to be out of the gate? From the consumer’s view, the technical distinctions among fixed, mobile,
cable and IP operators are essentially gone, and patience has gone with them. For all types of communications, consumers have
“internet expectations” about speed and simplicity. No one wants to wait a week or make multiple clicks to get a new service or
feature. Consumers expect to ask and get, or respond to a pitch and receive. If a new offer is more than a call or click away, most
subscribers simply will not bother.
For operators, a centralized product catalog is the first step in enabling true service agility. Defining products from an end-toend perspective harmonizes data to the composite applications. Driving all stages of the lead-to-service cycle from the catalog
eliminates issues resulting from isolated stacks that must be coordinated over and over again.
With a component-based approach, the catalog is expressly designed to centralize every aspect of product definition – from
pricing rules to quality-of-service requirements, while allowing for easy configuration and personalization. Further, the catalog
drives every process – order negotiation through order decomposition and orchestration touching fulfillment, charging/billing,
assurance and service delivery – all in real time.
In our rapidly-changing digital world, with fluid products that rely on a fabric of multiple suppliers and partners, operators can
no longer afford the traditional limitations surrounding product creation and delivery. Operators stand to lose major revenue if
their lead-to-service processes aren’t fast enough, sophisticated enough, nimble enough, and able to get the job done right the
first time. With a component-enabled catalog and robust solution methodology, they have a solution that not only removes the
limitations but also opens new business opportunities.
© Ericsson 2015