Oracle Order and Service Management™ Deployment

The deployment of a best of breed tool for order management benefits both the rollout of a new and complex ADSL and future modifications and rollouts.

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Project Context

Tele 2 Group, one of Europe's leading alternative telecom operators and focused in price-leading products, planned for 2007 the rollout in Poland of ADSL using Local Loop Unbundling (LLU). This project included the deployment of an order management tool to orchestrate provisioning processes.

The selected product was Oracle Communications Order and Service Management™ (OSM) and the systems integrator Optare Solutions. Although corporate systems in Tele2 Group managed most of the provisioning processes with a middleware, some branches were successfully using specialized tools, allowing shorter time to market, higher reuse of components and system decoupling (leading also to a more eTOMish landscape).

Project Description

The overall project had to deliver a solution by means of a combination of new systems (like the deployment of OSM), development on custom made legacy apps, integration with managed services and manual processes. OSM took a central role and had to be integrated both with upstream BSSs and downstream OSSs of every nature.

The OSM project comprised two related areas:

  • OSM, order and processes: Installation of the platform, designing and modeling the provisioning processes from business processes, modeling the order structure.
  • Integration with BSSs and OSSs: Using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) a methodology was followed putting a great effort in simplicity and developing patterns for the integrations, to ease future maintenance and operation.

Constraints and Challenges

Like in any ambitious integration project the team had to face both operational and technical challenges:

  • Timeframe: The system had to be available to rollout the ADSL product, so the deadline was only a few months away.
  • First similar tool in corporate systems: Used to custom developments on middleware, OSM is a change in the philosophy of order management. We put effort explaining this philosophy to every party.
  • Several parallel projects were being carried out for the same product rollout: ESB, activation, unbundling, order entry, messaging, inventory, etc.
  • LLU related issues, involving high complexity processes, subject to regulation by authorities.
  • Legacy systems previously developed ad-hoc.

  Summarizing, the differentiating factors that allowed the team to overcome the challenges were:

  • Empathy and alignment with the client. This included having cost-conscious thinking, openness to collaboration with other teams to fine-tune specifications and processes and also a very open management approach.
  • Agile and iterative project management. The team followed Scrum methodology delivering frequently working and demoable components so the end users could validate and other parallel projects could begin the integration as soon as it was completed.
  • Holistic view of a telecom operator, its processes and systems. Our contribution wasn't limited to OSM but spread to business processes, order structure, testing methodologies, future development and maintenance, systems management and operation, customer operations, unbundling management and ESB services definition.
  • Expertise of the team both in OSM, provisioning processes, LLU and ADSL and NGOSS (eTOM and SID)
  • Having in mind than not every case is a happy case, and exception management can make the difference

Project benefits

  • Those of a state of the art provisioning system: predeveloped advanced functionalities for order management, advanced order structure, ongoing order amendment, workgroup management, order audit, undo and redo modes, etc.
  • Systems decoupling due to the integration architecture and the processes were designed after TeleManagement Forum eTOM.
  • A deployment that fitted in the product rollout but is not restricted to that product but a tool for the future.
  • Enabling shorter time-to-market for next product rollouts.
     
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