Service Delivery Platforms are around for several years now. Even there is no standard definition of them, a Service Delivery Platform (or SDP) , would be a platform that a telecommunications service provider uses to deliver and manage telecommunications services over standard interfaces. The SDP concept was defined by several vendors in several different ways. TMForum saw this inconsistency and started… Read More »
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a relatively new term that entered to the telecommunication service provider’s jargon. Customer Experience Management is managing all the interactions of the Customer with the service provider. These interactions could be made over all available channels that are defined in the Customer Interface Management process. Call center, e-mail, Web, WAP… Read More »
As the level of maturity increases in the operators, they focus more on improving the quality of services they give. As I explained in my previous posts, SQM (or sometimes call BSM-Business Service Management) is the key to measure the quality of the overall service. In SQM, we model the service and the service is composed of multiple service… Read More »
Products and services that are sold by the service providers use multiple technologies that are implemented by multiple vendors. These vendors deployed their NEs into the provider’s network infrastructure. Each vendor also deployed an EMS system which is capable to manage their (and only their) NEs. These EMS systems are very welcomed by the providers… Read More »
According to TMForum, Customer Facing Service is a service that is represented as product offerings. This is quite explanatory. Another definition could be: Customer Facing Service (CFS) is any service that resides in the product/service catalog and interacts with the customer. A voice mail, site-to-site VPN, GSM voice, SMS etc. are all kinds of CFSs.… Read More »
Prepaid Billing systems, (which can also be called charging systems in day-to-day talks), run the billing process for the prepaid customer accounts. They heavily use the online charging mechanism rather than offline charging that we typically see in the postpaid billing systems. Online charging systems rate the usage on-the-fly and charge the user account immediately.… Read More »
Fraud Management systems are designed to detect and prevent the fraudulent behaviors of the users which cause revenue losses. There are multiple types of telecommunication frauds that needs to be addressed by these systems. Different fraud types should be detected and handled by different algorithms. Below, I list some techniques that are used to detect… Read More »
Billing systems collect usage records from devices and generate bills per customer based on predefined rules. Different systems in a service provider’s infrastructure produce logs about the usage. We call them usage data records or UDRs. If the usage is for voice calls, we call them CDRs, if the usage is about bandwidth; we call… Read More »
TAM (Telecom Application Map) is one of the frameworks of the NGOSS (Frameworx) initiative. Its main goal is to draw the boundaries of the OSS/BSS applications. Standardized business processes and the applications that run those business processes, emerged in parallel. However, the OSS application vendors named and scoped their applications by themselves without following a… Read More »
Configuration management is the process that manages the resource configurations. The term “provisioning” is sometimes used interchangeably with CM. First feature of the configuration managers is to provide abstraction, over the lower layer devices, which leads us to business process consolidation, reduced silos and increased enterprise effectiveness. Let me give an example on this. Suppose,… Read More »