Operations of a company require free flowing information & data to enable business processes to complete a task or goal. Within the telephone companies these systems are often termed as OSS or BSS. The BSS definitions largely refer to the interactions and processes of Billing Support Systems or customer relationship management. The OSS definition interacts with the operations of business or enterprise units to enable or support the services and the delivery mechanism.
Telco OSS systems contain data sources and elements such as Customer Information, Network Inventory, Equipment Inventory, Work Force Management, Service Offerings, Network & Service Monitoring, and others. The intent of this segment will focus on the relationship of remote users such as field techs or call center personel and how they access & utilize these data sources and process systems.
Some system sources seem obvious – such as Customer Information. But that single system defines 2 primary components, the exact location of the customer and where to send the bill. The customer location initiates the connection points of the Outside Plant Network to create a link from the Central Office to the customers address through the use of digital transport systems, or copper cable and pair configurations to deliver the services that can be enabled on the network.
The Services that ride on the network and the Network itself can be monitored for performance characteristics that allow both reactive and preventative actions to be analyzed, prioritized, and initiate automated processes or other OSS systems to take actions. This monitoring of the both the Service & the Network allow telcos to react to instantaneous conditions such as a Service outage for Voice Mail, and Network failures caused by cut cables or remote electronics failures in DLC or DSLAM locations. This ability to monitor inherently offers the reactive need to TEST the service or network as well.
Test systems are classified as either a monitoring test through a bridge, or intrusive test which generally breaks the service or network to isolate the condition to a point forward or back from the intrusion point. This is how customer problems are isolated through various test access points on the service and the network. As a customer contacts a repair call center, the call center agent assesses the customer description of the problem, and then initiates either service layer OSS data for evaluation, or creates connections to remote test access systems for network testing and isolation. This allows the properly trained workforce technician to be sent on the trouble report and ensures a fix of the problem on that single visit.
Since test access systems also can perform monitoring functions, trend analysis can be achieved on both the service layer and the transport layer. Degradation of service or network usually appears in common areas of the outside plant network caused by other technicians, or weather related problems such as lightning strikes, or water in cables. The most common elements such as the cable or pair groupings that service a neighborhood can be aggregated into clusters of trouble conditions. These clusters can be refined through additional metallic testing, trend analysis, network capacity to absorb the problem, or through the customer experience of repeats.
There is a wide variety of data sources, historical work activity records, and real-time test access systems that enable a telephone company to accurately predict where degradation of the network or service will occur based on constant evaluations of these system data feeds and monitoring feedbacks.
Most of these systems have a primary focus or function in support of specific business unit functions, and are not leveraged properly to aid or benefit other process. Where this does occur is called integrated system to system functions, that have processes that perform actions based on other data bases or data elements in an automated fashion.
The Network test systems were initialized to isolate the customer trouble location and only called upon for that specific customer at that time of trouble call. Since these systems can monitor also, this allowed telcos to see the problem before the customer called or have PREDICTOR like systems in place to automatically isolate the problem.
As the complexity of services grows from POTS, DSL towards IPTV and the network becomes more of a hybrid configurations such as fiber, copper, coax and wireless, they will depend on smarter rules based engines to automatically detect, test, analyze, and recommend the best resolutions for these customer troubles. These “smart rules” based processes apply standard Method & Procedures to the known condition being monitored on the service layer and network, and make the right choice as to how the condition is best solved. This migration towards automated analysis & decision processing has enabled telcos to lower their support cost with lower skilled personnel and customer self care.
The ability of systems to collect, correlate, and analyze data with automated rules will allow telco to compete at lower cost in the next generation of communications & entertainment services.