Service fulfillment is one of the most vital workflows that exist for any telco. It’s the process that turns prospects into paying customers. It’s the process that gains a return on all that capital a telco has tied up in their network investments. It’s the process that ensures the telco makes a good first impression on the customer. It’s a process that is run many, many times each day so the efficiency of the process will have a significant impact on determining the efficiency of the entire organisation.
The above-mentioned scenarios relate to the run-time side of service-fulfillment. If we extend service fulfilment to also include the design-time side, then this process can also allow a telco to gain a competitive advantage and cashflow benefit through getting new offerings to market faster than their competitors. When we say “design-time,” we mean the activities required to create a new product offering, which includes product definitions, end-to-end workflow designs that potentially have multiple decision points along the way, integrations to other IT, OSS and BSS solutions, contract models and more.
If you’re getting the impression that effective Service Fulfillment solutions can have a material impact on the profitability of a telco, then you’re exactly right. You’d also be right if you assumed that ineffective Service Fulfillment solutions can also have a material impact.
It’s not uncommon for telcos to have hundreds of thousands of SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) or unique offerings it sells to the market. In some cases, almost every customer offering becomes a bespoke solution. This introduces the challenge of effective coordination of all the in-flight orders that are being managed.
In addition, a primary aim of most telcos is to increase the repeatability of its offerings. Improved repeatability should lead to greater consistency (as perceived by customers, but also the telco’s own representatives from roles such as service managers to network operations to customer service). Improved repeatability also leads to a greater opportunity to benchmark and continually improve the service being offered. It also enhances profitability. Conversely, if every offering is bespoke, it’s much harder to benchmark and feed back improvements into the process design.
How is it done in SunVizion Service Fulfillment
This is why a catalogue-driven Service Fulfillment solution is so important. Modern catalog-driven solutions like SunVizion Service Fulfillment provide built-in modules with a focus on efficiency and repeatability. It provides a comprehensive solution that includes:
- Service Inventory Management (e.g. for stock control)
- Service Catalogue (e.g. for capturing all of fields, attributes and contractual obligations of a service), which also drives workflow-driven:
- Service Order Management (e.g. to manage activities relating to the order, throughout the life-cycle from activation to decommissioning)
- Provisioning / Orchestration (e.g. to manage the manual or automated steps that make configuration changes to the network and related systems
- Resource Management (e.g. to reserve and allocate capacity in the network as well as onboarding of new networks / topologies)
- Workforce Management (e.g. to match, dispatch and manage the field workforce to fulfil the customer order)
- Materials Management (e.g. to stock, allocate and replenish the materials and tools used by the field workforce)
- But also accommodates in-flight changes to the defined flows if needed
- Rapid modifications, adds or deletes to cope with the constant change occurring in a telco’s product offerings.
In most cases, these changes are achieved via the user interface without the need for any code changes (except to underlying orchestration plans or APIs).
If you’d like to discuss how the SunVizion Service Fulfillment suite can improve your agility and profitability, then book a consultation with us today.
