BSS stands for Business Support Systems.
What are Operational Support Systems?
Software (occasionally
hardware) applications that support back-office activities which operate on telecom’s
network, provision and maintain customer services.
OSS is traditionally used
by network planners, service designers, operations, architects, support, and
engineering teams in the service provider. Increasingly product managers and
senior staff under the CTO or COO may also use or rely on OSS to some extent.
What are Business Support Systems?
Software applications
that support front office activities such as customer interactions. Billing,
order management, customer relationship management, call centre automation, are
all BSS applications.
BSS may also encompass
the customer-facing veneer of OSS application such as trouble-ticketing and
service assurance – these are back-office activities but initiated directly by
contact with the customer.
This basic relationship
between OSS and BSS, where OSS is passed service orders and supplies service
assurance information to the BSS layer is often referred to as ‘Orders Down,
Faults Up’.
above. Super simple relationship between OSS and BSS
Is the integration between OSS and BSS clear?
In the past, OSS/BSS had
a clearer separation. A common job like capturing a customer order and
provisioning it required a simple BSS-to-OSS interface. “Deliver product X to
customer Y”. BSS would capture the order, set-up the billing and pass the order
to OSS for fulfillment.
Now, networks and services are more complicated, more flexible,
and telcos offer a range of differentiated products. OSS and BSS must liaise
over what could be ordered by the customer, based on what
service they already had, based on the network they would use, based on current
available resources, based on how far they were from the telephone exchange…
and so on. Offering a customer a service is now a negotiation between the
commercial products managed by BSS and the ability of OSS (and the local
network) to deliver certain products.
As a result, a number of
systems now straddle OSS/BSS:
·
Service Assurance systems are now integrated across OSS/BSS in order to
track service performance and ensure customer service-level agreements (SLA) are
met. Service Assurance may also pro-actively identify network failures,
initiating resolution action and notifying high-priority customers.
·
Service Catalogs (a.k.a. Product Catalogs) give the telco one place to list
products offered to customers and define what network resources can be used to
deliver the service. Service Catalogs offer product managers a tool that
joins-up the service offering and fulfillment processes across BSS and OSS.
·
Service Management applications allow greater interaction between OSS and BSS
processes when the service order and fulfillment process is complex. If a
service order comprises multiple technical resources, which are delivered by
multiple OSS systems, Service Management is responsible for orchestrating the
fulfilment process and keeping the customer-facing team informed about
progress, changes or deliver issues.
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