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.
