The May 2008 DIGEST Feature Article
Meeting Customers' Expectations for New Service
The advent of the internet and the success of online-driven business models have transformed the competitive telecommunications arena. Electronic commerce has revolutionized the purchasing process for consumers, who now can search, browse, select, pay for, as well as auction, items of every description — quickly and easily online. Companies such as Dell offer build-to-order solutions, using components from many suppliers and committing to delivery dates directly through their customer portals. These types of competitors also embrace advertising to enhance revenues and to cross-promote offerings to attract more customers.
A build-to-order solution offers exciting possibilities for the telecom industry.
Today's Consumer Mindset
Today's consumers, whether residential or business, welcome a customer-centric business model. They expect "anywhere commerce" from any device (e.g., handsets, television screens, or portals) at any time of day, and they also expect a multitude of products or product bundles to choose from. They want to browse product offers, determine availability, price, packaging, delivery, and place an order for the product they need and then track its status.
Today's service providers must have a customer-centric business model to deliver value to their customers. The greatest profits will go to those who get to market first with desirable products and then modify product offers and bundles quickly to meet changing demands.
"Just-in-time" service delivery, with a rationalized set of products and offers, using a best-in-class online retail model is key to success. Service providers need to rapidly create and provide new products within days, instead of the typical months, and rapidly respond to consumers in a predictive fashion.
Evolving Capabilities
A successful enterprise in the online world relies on end-to-end automation — from order to fulfillment to delivery. Much of the core processes for telecom carriers are automated, but there remains a large gap in two areas:
The first is integrated Product Lifecycle Management. This has been a desire of telecom companies for many years, but has always been seen as too complex to achieve. However, by standardizing the product definition and introducing lifecycle management, Service Providers can see a dramatic increase in time to revenue and a reduction in time and cost to market — something that is essential in today's online world.
The second gap is the lack of automation for assembly of complex products — this is usually a manual process that requires specialist customer-service skills that involve interviewing the customer, aligning the partner offer, creating specific pricing, and potentially resulting in a new product being created in multiple core systems. Thus, orders for such products often take weeks to produce, and often contain errors. There is a strong need for automating this process to create clean orders.
Integrated Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
Integrated PLM covers the lifespan of a product from concept, to order, to activation, to retirement. Key activities include:
Creating a Standard Product Definition
The design of a new product entails coming up with a concept, gathering market research, depicting the user experience, creating a market service description, and writing the business plan. Once the business plan is approved, the definition of the product concept gels, and the development of the product, service, and resource models can begin.
Using tools such as the TeleManagement Forum (TMF) Shared Information Data (SID) model can help to quicken the design. The TMF model enables a standard language for the definition of a product. It provides the structure for defining the:
- Product – The entity that the customer purchases
- Service – The underlying service required to fulfill the product to the customer
- Resource – The physical and logical resources required for a product offer.
Each of these areas allow for the definition of the business aspects of products, such as category, price, cost, package, and promotion, as well as the technical aspects such as bandwidth, router, and link. TMF SID will also tie policies and metrics to the standard product definition, and allow for the supporting relationships and infrastructure.
Building blocks or components are used to define the product, service, and resources. These components can be defined once and then used many times afterwards. The re-use of components can help shorten the time to market for new products by reducing the design time involved in new product development.
Once a standard product specification is created, the information can be supplied to other BSS, OSS, and Service Delivery Platforms via a standard mechanism such as Service Order Architecture (SOA). TMF SID allows the diverse applications to speak the same language and an SOA-based infrastructure helps to make the communication possible.
This model-driven approach aims at streamlining the ordering of complex communications products.
Creating Product Offerings
Once a standard specification of a product is developed, it can then be used to construct many commercial product offerings. Such offers are differentiated by a set of characteristics defining the various attributes associated with the offering. The differentiators define the offer: e.g., a Gold package vs. a Silver or Bronze package. A Gold package may include a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with better response times, increased hours of customer support, etc.
Source
Enabling new Supply Chain methodologies in the product lifecycle can improve time to market for new products and reduce costs; however, sourcing Supplier-provided product components can sometimes be cumbersome and require long lead times.
The first step in the Sourcing process should be enabling a supply chain. To increase the chance of success in the market, partner offers can be combined within product offerings, within the same component-based structure. If a standard, rationalized, and normalized product model can help get products to market faster, then the same principle can be shared with partners/suppliers.
Determination of partner content, price, and delivery at the time of a customer order is needed to increase the ability to be agile and responsive to customer needs.
Deploy/Package/Distribute
Development and utilization of a robust catalog to house specifications and product offerings can allow Customer Service Representatives to browse the catalog and search for offerings when interacting with customers. Product offerings can be packaged into bundles of offerings with bundled pricing and can be managed under different categories such as Consumer and Enterprise.
Retire/Manage Change
Continuous information management can help a product manager determine the necessary dates for lifecycle changes. The use of metrics in product marketing can help determine when to branch out to a new market and which new market to pursue.
Policy Management
Policies can enhance the real-time processing of orders. Policies that capture business rules and preferences, when mapped to the product model, are useful in defining business processes for performing order and product management tasks. Policies can be used to create global business processes or local processes.
Automation to Streamline Order Assembly
In today's world of order management for complex or highly differentiated products, the customer experience may involve steps such as these when the customer wants to order a multi-site Virtual Private Network (VPN) — 1) they must place a call to the Provider's customer service center, 2) the Customer Service Representative (CSR) searches multiple catalogs, maybe a few spreadsheets, to find the right price, 3) a quote is worked out together after many rounds of review, and 4) it is sent out for approval. Then, the customer waits and waits for delivery.
But, imagine if. . . the customer could access the Provider's online portal, browse a comprehensive and relevant catalog of offerings, enter criteria, be guided through the order assembly process, wait seconds while a quote is calculated, approve the quote online, and place the order – and the product is quickly fulfilled!
Telcordia offers a solution to make this a reality.
Responding to the Challenges
Telcordia has developed a product that provides a superior solution to the complex processes discussed. Telcordia knowledge of complex telecoms processes enables a unique understanding of the issue and the solution.
Telcordia® Dynamic Service Catalog is one of the newest solutions from Telcordia. Dynamic Service Catalog allows a service provider to quickly bring new services to market by recognizing the central importance of a well-defined, structured, and extensible product catalog. This solution allows the provider to create the product and component specifications, as well as product offerings, that prospective customers can purchase. It provides a recommendation engine for product offerings that enable a provider's customer to choose an appropriate solution (e.g., every site for a multi-site VPN) and save it to a quote. In addition, Dynamic Service Catalog initiates the order management process to the provider's order management system, tying into the fulfillment processes.
The Dynamic Service Catalog consists of the Designer, the Product Catalog, and the Supply Chain Order Manager, and provides a thin-client GUI for product selection and recommendations.
Telcordia integrates Dynamic Service Catalog with order management and inventory in the Fulfillment stack, along with other key systems such as CRM, thus bridging BSS to OSS and dramatically improving the product modeling, product selection, and order fulfillment processes.
The Value of Product Innovation and Differentiation
Telcordia Dynamic Service Catalog enables service providers to streamline the business processes for product lifecycle management, from "Concept to Market" and "Prospect to Cash."
From "Concept to Market," a product manager can manage their product portfolio in one centralized repository for both commercial offers and technical specifications. A graphical Designer is used to create product specifications from existing and new product/service and resource components.
The integrated, dynamic solution provides the product marketing team with a single platform to support the creation of product offerings quickly through pre-built product specifications.
Telcordia Dynamic Service Catalog also becomes an integral part of the end-to-end process from "Prospect to Cash." It automates the sales process by providing a recommendation engine for product selection, enables customer choice, quote preparation, order management execution, and generation of clean orders.
The Bottom Line
The drive to differentiate is fundamental to superior business performance and is driven by economic and technological forces. Innovation in products and services is essential in the IP-centric environment where new competitors are entering the market along with the ability to design, build, activate, and cost-effectively operate the network required to support them in a constantly changing environment.
With Telcordia Dynamic Service Catalog, service providers can achieve online success by leveraging the Telcordia commitment to best-of-breed, pragmatic communications solutions – tightly integrated into a Fulfillment suite – to provide end-to-end automation where it will bring greatest benefits.
Contact Telcordia
For more information on the Telcordia Dynamic Service Catalog solution, please contact:
Elaine Haher
Director – Dynamic Service Catalog Product Managements
Global Solutions
Telcordia
One Telcordia Drive, Room RRC-6R317
Piscataway, NJ 08854-4182
+ 1.732.699.8069
E-mail: ehaher@telcordia.com
Or, locate your regional Telcordia sales office here.