When deciding where to spend increasingly precious resources, service providers should keep profitability and operational efficiency as their primary goals, according to a report this month from Yankee Group vice president Ari Banerjee. And to achieve profitability and operational efficiency, they need to invest in streamlining their entire order management process.
Service providers also must be more inclusive in their planning to incorporate the collaboration requirements of retailers, content partners and supply chain partners and advertisers.
These partners, Banerjee said, are reshaping service providers’ revenue ecosystem and creating an intricate tapestry of revenue relationships. Tightly linking their business processes with media and content partners is the only way to exploit the full potential of investments service providers have made in their networks and back office systems.
Because the order management process touches all aspects of the operation, Banerjee said end-to-end order management is a good place to start. For the same reason, tying all these touch points and process flows together remains a challenge.
Ultimately, service providers need the “ability to provision [order management] solutions to decompose high volumes of commercial orders into specific components and send network parameters in specific sequences and dependencies based on rules and policies at optimum speed,” Banerjee said, and called the capability a critical stability benchmark for provision OM solutions.
That’s the technical view. The business view is easier to understand: “Inefficiency in the OM process increases service providers’ operational costs, which negatively impacts their bottom line,” Banerjee said. “It is crucial [that] CSPs create tighter synergies between the order management and sales processes to better service customers and improve their service delivery process.”
Today, those synergies are pretty loose. The industry average for service providers to launch a new service is still 90 days to one year. It takes 20 days on average to change or modify offers. Thirty to 40 percent of revenue leakage can be attributed to the order process alone, and the fallout rate of orders hovers at 15 to 20 percent. And the average cost of those errors ranges from $12 to $300 for customer support calls and truck rolls respectively.
Yankee Group’s report, End-to-End Order Management Automates the Service Provider’s Value Chain, offers suggestions on how best to align the supply chain, service fulfillment and sales processes. Above all, an end-to-end order management system should be standards-based and tightly integrated with other fulfillment, billing, customer care and assurance systems.
“Siloed OM implementations will not meet all the dynamic requirements of [service providers] today,” Banerjee said.
External forces are also driving the need and urgency for improved order management. These forces include: escalating order volumes from enterprise customers, demand for better Web-based self-care portals, the proliferation of IP services, wholesale and media and content services.
There is no more room for OM systems that cannot flawlessly provide service-specific templates, jeopardy and exception management, integration to the supply chain processes, real-time order visibility and much more, the report said. It also evaluates the capabilities being offered by large BSS/OSS vendors such as Amdocs, Convergys, CGI, Comptel and Oracle, as well as the capabilities of ConceptWave, which it considers the only independent OM vendor successful in the communications service provider space providing order automation and order management solutions that serve the entire gamut of the service provider market.
“In a nutshell,” Banerjee said, “It is the job of the end-to-end order management system to bridge the gap between ordering and operational support systems to reduce order delays and decrease time to revenue.”
