This article is part of our IntelliBRIGHT series, highlighting Intellias’s step-by-step guide to OSS/ BSS transformation in telecom.
Constructing a robust and adaptable network is much like building a modern skyscraper. At the core of this architectural feat are business support systems (BSS) and operations support systems (OSS) – the essential building blocks that enable telecom operators to deliver innovative, high-quality services. Just as a hotel’s integrity depends on a solid foundation and intelligent design, the efficiency and success of a telecom operator hinge on the strength and flexibility of its OSS/BSS architecture.
But how do telecom operators achieve such a strong and flexible architecture? The key lies in embracing standardized, cloud-native, and modular designs that incorporate advanced technologies and autonomous operations. This article explores how these foundational elements come together to shape a unified and efficient telecom architecture.
BSS: The client-facing structure of telecom
Imagine walking into a grand hotel in London: the sleek glass facade catches your eye, the welcoming lobby invites you in, and a helpful concierge guides you to your destination. This client-facing part of hotel is meticulously designed to create a seamless and engaging experience for every guest. In telecommunications, business support systems serve a similar purpose. They are the customer-facing components that shape how users interact with telecom services, manage their accounts, and experience the brand.
Business support systems handle everything from product offerings and billing to customer management and service activation. Like a well-run hotel, a well-designed telecom BSS solution ensures that customers feel valued, services are accessible, and interactions are smooth.
Key functions of BSS: Building the customer experience
Product management, or the showroom of offerings
Just as a well-organized showroom displays products attractively, the enterprise product catalog shows all product offerings, including pricing and eligibility rules. It allows customers to explore and select products and services that meet their needs, enhancing their engagement with the telecom operator.
Customer management: The concierge desk
The concierge in a hotel ensures guests have everything they need. Similarly, customer management handles customer profiles, contract management, communications, and case management. It maintains customer identities and supports sales activities, ensuring personalized and efficient service.
Partner management: Collaborative spaces
Modern hotels often include spaces for collaborating and even for hosting conferences. Partner management oversees relationships with sales partners, service providers, and other telecom operators, managing settlements and expanding the range of services available to customers.
Order management: Streamlined pathways
Well-placed and well-designed signs make navigating a hotel effortless. Order management captures customer orders and processes them efficiently. It ensures that customers receive their requested services promptly, enhancing satisfaction.
Revenue management: The billing office
Behind every successful establishment is a well-functioning billing department. Revenue management encompasses charging, billing, payments, and fraud management. It ensures transparent and accurate financial transactions, reinforcing trust between the customer and the operator.
OSS: The behind-the-scenes infrastructure
While BSS is the welcoming facade, behind the scenes lies a complex network of systems – electrical wiring, plumbing, heating and cooling – that keeps a hotel functioning flawlessly. In telecommunications, this is the role of OSS. Operations support systems focus on the operational aspects of the network, ensuring that services are delivered promptly and issues are resolved swiftly.
OSS provides the data and insights needed for network architects and engineers to design, monitor, and enhance the network. It automates routine tasks, orchestrates service provisioning, detects outages, and ensures that customers enjoy uninterrupted services.
Key functions of OSS: The vital systems behind the walls
Management: The control room
Just as a hotel’s control room monitors all systems to optimize performance, network management provides continuous oversight to optimize services and identify areas for improvement.
Automation of routine tasks: Efficient operations
Automated lighting and climate control enhance a hotel’s efficiency. Similarly, automation of routine tasks in OSS eases network roll-out, installations, and work orders, ensuring efficient and accurate operations.
Service provisioning and activation: Connecting utilities
Connecting utilities like water and electricity to new rooms is essential in a hotel. Service provisioning and activation automates service provisioning for customer orders, ensuring quick and accurate delivery.
Service assurance: Maintenance teams at work
Just as a maintenance team keeps a hotel safe and functional, service assurance proactively monitors the network to detect and resolve issues before they impact guests, maintaining service quality and reliability.
Providing insights: Strategic decision-making tools
Hotel management systems provide data on energy use and occupancy trends. Similarly, within OSS, analytics tools provide telecom executives and network planners with data on the ROI of specific technologies, network performance metrics, and customer usage patterns, aiding them in strategic decision-making.
Building a B/OSS architecture: The backbone of telecom innovation
While BSS and OSS serve different purposes, their synergy is crucial for the overall efficiency and success of the telecom edifice. Just as merging aesthetic appeal with structural integrity creates a remarkable hotel, uniting BSS and OSS architectures results in a system that ensures seamless service delivery and reliable network operations.
What are the primary steps to take?
1. Identifying transformation drivers
Every successful project begins with a clear vision. When designing an OSS/BSS architecture, this means understanding the transformation drivers that necessitate change:
- Business drivers: Introducing new services, enhancing customer experiences, or achieving convergence between fixed and mobile offerings
- Technological drivers: Adopting emerging technologies like 5G, IoT, and cloud computing
- Market drivers: Responding to competitive pressures, regulatory changes, and shifting customer expectations
2. Establishing architectural principles
Having defined the purpose of designing a new OSS/BSS architecture, the next step is to set the architectural principles that will guide its design:
- Scalability and cloud-native design: Building an architecture that can grow and adapt, much like a hotel designed for future expansion
- Modularity and flexibility: Using components that can be easily added or replaced, similar to modular construction techniques
- Interoperability with Open APIs: Ensuring seamless communication between systems, akin to standardized connectors in hotel’s infrastructure
- Security by design: Integrating security measures from the outset, just as safety features are embedded in a hotel’s design
- Standardization: Adhering to industry standards to ensure compatibility and quality across all components
3. Planning the transformation approach
Strategic planning is crucial to bring the architecture to life. Key considerations include:
- Vendor selection: Choosing one or more vendors based on expertise and consistency
- Cloud strategy: Deciding on public, private, or hybrid cloud deployment
- System consolidation: Determining whether to have a unified system or separate stacks for different services
- Organizational structure: Aligning company units (e.g., ServiceCo, NetCo) for efficiency
- Digital channels strategy: Planning customer access through unified or specialized channels
- Scale of transformation: Opting for a complete overhaul or gradual implementation
- Integration with partners: Collaborating to offer combined solutions
- Technology choices: Deciding between off-the-shelf solutions or custom development
- Data migration strategy: Planning transitions without disrupting operations
4. Selecting a reference architecture
Adopting a proven reference architecture streamlines the design process. The TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) provides comprehensive guidelines and tools tailored to the telecom industry, ensuring standardization and interoperability.
5. Modeling the target architecture
With a reference in place, operators can model the target OSS/BSS architecture:
- Identify impacted domains: Determine which business areas will be transformed
- Define interfaces and APIs: Design how systems will communicate effectively
- Organize value streams: Map processes that deliver customer value
- Assemble the team: Bring together experts to execute the plan cohesively
The importance of OSS/BSS architectural synergy
While BSS and OSS serve distinct functions within a telecommunications company, the synergy between them is vital for a strong and efficient business. It is the integration and collaboration of BSS and OSS that enable seamless service delivery, optimize network performance, and enhance customer experiences, ultimately driving business success.
Source: WisdomPlexus
A unified OSS/BSS architecture integrates components from both systems into a cohesive framework, enabling a seamless information flow between customer management, service provisioning, network operations, and billing.
When a customer places an order through BSS, OSS automatically handles network execution tasks like service provisioning and activation, ensuring prompt and accurate delivery. By unifying service provisioning and activation, customer orders are efficiently coordinated with network configurations.
Resource management becomes more effective through joint management of network assets (OSS) and customer resources (BSS), optimizing utilization of logical or virtual resources (like phone numbers, IP addresses, software licenses, etc.) and reducing their redundancy in the entire telecom infrastructure.
Workforce management aligns field operations with customer needs. When issues are reported via BSS, OSS schedules field technicians promptly, considering skill sets and availability.
Service assurance leverages data from both systems to maintain high service quality, combining network performance metrics (OSS) with customer experience data (BSS) to proactively resolve issues and meet service-level agreements (SLAs).
This integration is achieved through the adoption of industry standards like the TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture and the use of Open APIs. ODA standards ensure that components share a common functional architecture and common data models, promoting interoperability and scalability. Open APIs facilitate standardized communication between systems, enabling seamless integration of new technologies and third-party services without extensive custom development.
By embracing these standards and effectively integrating OSS and BSS components, telecom operators can build a robust, scalable architecture that streamlines processes, enhances efficiency, and delivers superior customer experiences.
Integration challenges
However, integrating BSS and OSS is not without its challenges. Just as architects and engineers must overcome obstacles to unify a hotel’s design and functionality, telecom operators face limitations in merging these systems.
Complex integration: The labyrinth of connections
Multiple external systems need to connect with both BSS and OSS, much like a complex network of pipes and cables must fit precisely without interfering with each other. This complexity can lead to increased maintenance efforts and higher costs.
Tightly coupled systems: Structural constraints
Traditionally, BSS and OSS applications have been tightly coupled, meaning changes in one system can significantly impact the other. The resulting lack of flexibility is akin to a hotel where every wall is load-bearing, making renovations or expansions difficult without substantial modifications.
Integration with external systems: Compatibility challenges
BSS and OSS often need to work with external systems that have unique interfaces and data formats. Integrating these can be complex and require significant development effort, similar to connecting different HVAC or electrical systems within a hotel that weren’t designed to work together.
Complex transaction management: Coordinating multiple contractors
Simple customer actions, such as creating a new account, may require updating multiple systems across both BSS and OSS: billing, CRM, network provisioning, and more. Managing these actions efficiently is challenging, much like coordinating multiple contractors working simultaneously on different aspects of a hotel project without causing delays or conflicts.
Overcoming the challenges
To address these limitations and enhance the synergy between BSS and OSS, telecom operators can:
- Adopt standardized interfaces and Open APIs: Using industry standards simplifies integration, allowing systems to communicate more easily – just as standardized building components make construction and maintenance more straightforward.
- Embrace modular and flexible architectures: Designing systems with modular components enables greater flexibility, allowing for changes or upgrades without overhauling the entire structure – similar to modular construction techniques in architecture.
- Implement middleware and integration platforms: Using middleware can help manage the complexity of integrating multiple systems by providing a common platform for data exchange, akin to a central hub in a hotel that consolidates utilities for easier access and management.
Bottom line
In uniting client-facing BSS with robust OSS infrastructure, telecom operators can build cohesive ecosystems that support their strategic goals. By recognizing the importance of both systems and addressing integration challenges, telecoms lay a solid foundation for future innovation and growth – much like architects who lay a foundation to stand the test of time and adapt to the evolving needs of its occupants.
Despite the challenges, integrating BSS and OSS is essential for delivering seamless services in an increasingly competitive and technologically advanced industry. Through careful planning and adherence to industry standards, and by embracing modern architectural principles, a telecom operator can construct an OSS/BSS architecture that not only meets today’s demands but that looks towards the future.
