About Central Order Management and Service Order Management

When fulfilling orders, OSM can perform two primary roles:

■ Central order management

■ Service order management

OSM in the central order management role receives customer orders from one or more

order-source systems. OSM creates an order, and manages the fulfillment of the order

across other enterprise systems including billing systems, shipping systems, and

service fulfillment systems.

The central order management role is also responsible for receiving status information

from the fulfillment systems and providing an aggregated status back to the

order-source systems. The central order management role is sometimes called central

fulfillment.

OSM in the service order management role is typically a part of a dedicated service

fulfillment system, working with inventory and activation systems to fulfill services in

About Central Order Management and Service Order Management

OSM Concepts

one or more network domains. OSM in its service order management role typically

receives a service order that manages a limited part of the overall order fulfillment. A

service order is typically sent by OSM in its central order management role. OSM

service order management can orchestrate and manage the fulfillment of the services

and resources for the order. It typically works in conjunction with an inventory system

to track and allocate resources (assign-and-design) and an activation system to

configure the network devices and applications. The service order management role is

sometimes called provisioning or local fulfillment.

All OSM functionality; (for example, orchestration) can be used in both of the roles.

However, the order processing performed by OSM in the central order management

role typically uses orchestration more, because of the need to manage relationships

between multiple systems. Orders sent to a service order management system often do

not require an orchestration plan because the tasks in the order can be run as a static

process by OSM.

As an example, an order might be processed as follows:

1. OSM in its central order management role receives a customer order for a

broadband service. Included in the order are requirements for billing, shipping,

and provisioning.

2. OSM generates an orchestration plan, which runs the various fulfillment processes

needed to fulfill the order.

3. To provision the order, OSM uses an automated task to create a separate service

order, which is sent to another instance of OSM functioning in the service order

management role.

4. OSM in its service order management role receives the service order and processes

the provisioning task. It sends the status back to the OSM instance running in the

central order management role.

Service order management typically handles specific provisioning tasks that do not

require orchestration, but you can use orchestration with service order management.

 shows two scenarios. In the first scenario, central order management

handles provisioning for a fixed-line service and a DSL service separately, and it is

therefore able to send service orders directly to OSM in the service order management

role. In the second scenario, the fixed-line service and the DSL service are sent

simultaneously to service order management. Service order management uses an

orchestration plan to send the provisioning requests to separate fulfillment

1. OSM first reads the incoming customer order and creates order items from the

order line items contained in the order.  shows that order line items for

two fixed services and handsets are derived from the order. There are different

regions defined for each service and handset (Ontario and Quebec).

2. OSM begins the orchestration process. The first step is to assign the order items to

order components that are based on fulfillment functions.  shows that

the order items are organized into three function order components: Provisioning,

Shipping, and Billing. The fixed-line services require provisioning, the handsets

require shipping, and all order items require billing, so they are all included in the

Billing order component.

3. The Billing order component must be decomposed further.  shows two

levels of decomposition:

■ Order items for the Ontario and Quebec regions are decomposed into target

system order components. This sends the billing fulfillment process to the

correct region, Ontario or Quebec.

■ For each region, the fixed-line service must be billed separately from the

handset.