Page 350 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

Network Management and Administration 3-141

An order management system implements two types of functions. The first type is the management of
end-to-end processes, which includes process management composed of several subprocesses. The other
one is support of order management, service configuration, and service activation. Customer interface
management, resource configuration and allocation, and S/P relationship management are fulfilled by
other systems.

3.6.3.6 Customer Problem Handling
This area is responsible for receiving trouble reports from customers, resolving them to the customer’s satis-
faction, and providing meaningful status information on repair and/or restoration activity to the customer.
Principal functions are:
• Isolate Problem and Initiate Resolution: Receive and isolate the problem and initiate resolution
actions. The process registers and analyses received trouble reports from customers; registers
received information about customers impacted by service-affecting problems; and reports prob-
lem information to isolate the source/origin of the problem in order to determine what actions
have to be taken, and to initiate the resolution of the problem.
• Report Problem: Generate and manage all reports that will be issued to the customer or to other
processes concerning the problem.
• Track and Manage Problem: Track and manage the evolution of the problem during its lifecycle.
The process can proactively or passively obtain information about a problem state, get its attri-
butes, or obtain its archived form after its closure. Moreover, the process is responsible for the
management of the escalation of the problem.
• Close Problem: Ensure that a problem affecting the customer is solved, that the customer is con-
tacted if necessary to inquire about the customer’s satisfaction with resolution of the problem, and
agree to correct reporting on SLA/QoS violations.
3.6.3.7 Customer Quality of Service and Service-Level Agreement
This process is part of the Assurance end-to end (vertical) processes and the CRM (horizontal) process
group as well. The process is responsible for the CRM part of resolving a problem, and must interwork
with other related Service and Resource Management processes.
Customer Quality of Service (QoS) and Service-Level Agreement (SLA) Management (Contract
and SLA Management) is a set of functions that assists operators in ensuring that their customers get
the level of service for which they are paying. This process encompasses monitoring, managing, and
reporting of quality of service (QoS) as defined in service descriptions, service-level agreements, and
other service-related documents. It includes network performance, but also performance across all
service parameters, e.g., orders completed on time. Outputs of this process are standard (predefined)
and exception reports including, but not limited to, dashboards, performance of a service against an
SLA, reports of any developing capacity problems, reports of customer usage patterns, etc. In addition,
this process responds to performance inquiries from the customer. For SLA violations, the process
supports notifying the staff responsible for problem handling, and for QoS violations, notifying man-
agement. The aim is to provide effective monitoring. Monitoring and reporting must provide SP man-
agement and customers with meaningful and timely performance information across the parameters
of the services provided. The aim is also to manage service levels that meet specific SLA and standard
service commitments.
This is not to be confused with the related set of functions and applications that exist at the service
management and resource management layers to help operational managers understand the perfor-
mance of services and network resources respectively.
Customer QoS functions aim to measure the customer’s perceived quality of service. An example of
this is the approach taken to measure voice or video quality as perceived by a human being. QoS mea-
surements may be applied either on a per-customer basis, against a group of customers service quality