Telcos Need Better OSS Processes To Stem Revenue Losses: Light Reading

As competition for business and consumer services intensifies, telecom operators need to implement more efficient order-to-cash processes to streamline time-to-market, billing, and service fulfillment or risk further revenue losses to more nimble competitors, according to the latest report from Light Reading’s Services Software Insider, a paid research service of TechWeb’s Light Reading.

‘Order to Cash: How SOA Can Break Down Telco OSS Silos’ analyses the scope of the order-to-cash process and how the need to sell a next generation of products is driving demand for a service oriented architecture (SOA)-based operation support system/ business support system (OSS/BSS) architecture. The report looks at process and system areas that are challenging telco process architects as they try to consolidate and manage product data centrally and create a future-proof process that spans fulfillment and billing domains.

“With order fallout rates reaching 40 percent or more and time to market delays of three to six months as they struggle to integrate new products with billing and fulfillment systems, operators are targeting the order-to-cash process as ripe for transformation,” says Caroline Chappell, research analyst with Light Reading’s Services Software Insider and author of the report. “The need to support order-to-cash in a more flexible and standardised way across the business is leading the most advanced operators to adopt service-oriented architecture concepts and technologies.”

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SOA technologies are playing a large role in the order-to-cash solution; however, operators must ensure they are thinking of the future and not just the present time when implementing their fixes, Chappell states. “OSS/ BSS vendors are re-engineering their products using SOA concepts and technologies, often to address the same integration problems that operators have faced,” she says. “In the current economic climate, as operators go for ‘quick fixes,’ they should be careful that these do not play into the hands of vendors, creating more OSS/ BSS silos that may make them less agile in the future.”

Key findings of Order to Cash: How SOA Can Break Down Telco OSS Silos include:

* Operators view the order-to-cash process as the proof point for an SOA approach to OSS/ BSS transformation, but metrics are still needed to convince the wider market

* An SOA approach to order-to-cash can help speed up the ingestion and integration of third-party products as service providers expand their product portfolios

* The common product catalogue is emerging as a big winner as the market moves toward a more consolidated, end-to-end approach to order-to-cash

* Operators in the TM Forum Blueprint Initiative will pressure vendors to align their products with emerging Blueprint business services