Page 346 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

Network Management and Administration 3-137

The Assurance processes are responsible for the execution of proactive and reactive maintenance
activities to ensure that services provided to customers are continuously available and to Service-Level
Agreement (SLA) or Quality of Service (QoS) performance levels. It performs continuous resource sta-
tus and performance monitoring to proactively detect possible failures. It collects performance data and
analyzes it to identify potential problems and resolve them without impact to the customer. This process
manages the SLAs and reports service performance to the customer. It receives trouble reports from the
customer, informs the customer of the trouble status, and ensures restoration and repair, as well as a
delighted customer.
The key system in this area of provider business processes is CRM. This system is the source of record
for all customer and service data.
There is often a separate trouble ticketing system in use for both customer-originated and NOC-
originated trouble tickets. Both network and customer trouble ticketing plays a key role in service assur-
ance processes. Automation of these processes invariably involves the automated creation, tracking, and
closure of trouble tickets, along with appropriate customer and field personnel notifications throughout
the ticketing workflow.

3.6.2.9 Billing and Revenue Assurance
This process grouping is responsible for the production of accurate bills in time, or providing pre-bill
use information and billing to customers, processing their payments, and performing payment col-
lections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is
responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer’s satisfaction in a timely manner. This process
grouping also supports prepayment for services.
Billing systems can be simple enough to handle flat-rate monthly billing, or complex enough to rate
and present bills for usage-based or value-based services. They are usually the last workflow destination
in customer-facing processes. At the point an order is fully provisioned, tested, and sent to billing, it is
considered a revenue-generating service.
In order to successfully automate various business processes, it is critical that engineering and traffic
analysis/planning systems are tightly coupled with logical and physical inventory events and queries
across Element Management System (EMS) interface boundaries.
The billing process offers the following services:

• Rapid creation of new service plans and rates; flexible rating and discount options (“pricing”)
• Real-time event processing
• Convergent billing
• Prepaid and postpaid billing
• Customer self-management of services via the Web
• Analysis of customers, rates, plans, usage, etc.

3.6.2.10 Operations Support and Readiness (OSR-Operations Area)
Operations Support and Readiness (OSR) in the Operations Process Group is differentiated from FAB
real-time processes to highlight the focus on enabling support and automation in FAB, i.e., online and
immediate support of customers. It ensures that the operational environment is in place to let the FAB
processes do their job. This process is responsible for support to the FAB processes, and for ensuring
operational readiness in the fulfillment, assurance, and billing areas. In general, the processes are con-
cerned with activities that are less “real-time” than those in FAB, and which are typically concerned
less with individual customers and services and more with groups of these. They reflect a need in some
organizations to divide their processes between the immediate customer-facing and real-time opera-
tions of FAB and other Operations processes, which act as a “second line” in carrying out the opera-
tional tasks.