Businesses have used catalogs to drive their e-commerce activity for years. The catalog is used to determine what products are sold, when they are sold, to whom they are available, and at what price. Catalogs typically also manage the product characteristics to help clients select suitable products.
But why stop here? Why not extend the catalog to drive your end-to end fulfillment and service assurance processes? In the telecommunications world, the OSS/BSS we catalog-drive includes order decomposition, order orchestration, activation, charging, policy and assurance domains, to name a few. Each of these domains has the same basic requirement: Determining what process/policy applies based on who, when and where the product was sold.
A catalog centric model delivers tremendous business benefits:
Faster Time to Market: New products and offers are defined once, in one place, and all surrounding processes immediately understand what to do based on the catalog definition.
Improved Customer Satisfaction: With all processes operating on the same definition of what was sold, you know that what was sold, is what is provisioned, and what will be billed. Ensuring that the customer receives what is ordered, and pays what was promised, is critical in improving the customer experience.
Reduced Operations Costs: With fewer systems to update, and a reduction in the number of points of failure, fewer staff will be required to roll-out new services, and to deal with customer service issues.
Improved Competitiveness: With a centralized catalog, your enterprise will be able to quickly respond to competitors, and in fact to take the lead with innovative offerings.
- Opportunity assessment for your OSS/BSS
- Optimization and normalization of the existing products and offers
- Establishing an Enterprise Catalog
- Adapting your OSS/BSS to leverage the new catalog
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