Rapid introduction of new services is often hampered by legacy back-office systems. Service fulfillment automates the process for delivering technologies such as DSL, Voice over IP, Ethernet and Virtual Private Network (VPN). It handles all the business and technical processes involved in managing each customer order in an environment where a start, stop or change of any service is a complex task.

Different customers on the same network are often supported by different equipment types, software releases and/or geographically distributed servers. Frequent network upgrades, temporary outages and a continuous introduction of new services often lead to fallout or jeopardy situations that need to be resolved quickly.

Accurate inventory is critical for automated fulfillment

Fulfillment solutions rely on the underlying accuracy of the inventory data to be able to make the right decisions. As with any retail stock control system, if the computer records don’t match the physical stock in the warehouse, then customer orders cannot be satisfied. This leads to poor customer satisfaction and often great expense to remedy the situation.

High accuracy of the inventory can be achieved by ensuring that all changes to the network are first designed and implemented through the inventory system itself. It has to be the “master” of the data, able to overwrite any temporary workarounds or unknown changes. Synchronization with network through network management systems allows discrepancies to be regularly and automatically identified. Common issues can often be automatically resolved based on standard pre-defined rules.

This combined two pronged approach – using the Inventory as the master for all network design changes, and validating them with the live network – leads to very high and continuously improving data accuracy. Levels of 99% or greater have been reported, which are very much higher than the 40-80% seen in some cases.

Manual fulfillment processes don’t scale

Where manual processes are used, a lack of co-ordination between different planners can result in double booking of the same resource. Inaccurate and out-of-date records for resource allocation can lead to unexpected disconnection or disruption of existing services, delays in fulfillment or inability to deliver the service at all.

On the other hand, automated fulfillment allows individual customers to have services enabled in seconds. This not only leads to much greater customer satisfaction and resulting revenue, but also reduces the time and costs to deliver each new service and deal with errors and fallout during the process.

Automation of any fulfillment process requires a clear definition of the procedure, well defined rules and accurate knowledge of the network equipment used to deliver the service. Without these in place, high levels of fallout can occur which require substantial manual intervention to deal with. Fulfillment may not be able to proceed because of exhausted resources at many different parts of the network such as a lack of physical cables, lack of spare ports, insufficient server capacity or bandwidth limitations.

With effective automated fulfillment, tens of thousands of orders can be processed daily, each with subtly different parameters to fit different needs.

Having fulfilled a new service, the service provider must then ensure that appropriate service quality including fault resolution is maintained. This requires a Service Assurance OSS capability.