Business support system

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Business support systems (BSS) are the components that a telephone operator or telco uses to run its business operations towards customer. BSS and OSS platforms are linked in the need to support various end to end services. Each area has its own data and service responsibilities.

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Role of business support systems [edit]

Basically it deals with the taking of orders, payment issues, revenues etc. The role of business support systems in a service provider is to cover four main areas:

  • Product management
  • Order management
  • Revenue management
  • Customer management

Product management [edit]

Product management supports product development, the sales and management of products, offers and bundles to businesses and mass-market customers. Product management regularly includes offering cross-product discounts, appropriate pricing and managing how products relate to one another.

Customer management [edit]

Service providers require a single view of the customer and regularly need to support complex hierarchies across customer-facing applications (customer relationship management). Customer management also covers requirements for partner management and 24x7 web-based customer self-service. Customer management can also be thought of as full-fledged customer relationship management systems implemented to help customer care agents handle the customers in a better and more informed manner.

Revenue management [edit]

Revenue management is a BSS focus on billing, charging and settlement, that can handle any combination of OSS services, products and offers. BSS revenue management supports OSS order provisioning and often partner settlement.Billing is an integral function offered by BSS systems and is not under the purview of Operation Support Systems.

Order management [edit]

Order management as a beginning of assurance is normally associated with operations support systems though business support systems are often the business driver for fulfillment management and order provisioning.
Order management encompasses four broad areas in general -

Order decomposition - This process details the rules for decomposing a Sales Order into multiple work orders or service orders. For example, a Triple Play Telco Sales order with three services - land line, Internet and wireless can be broken down into three sub-orders - one for each line of business. Each of the sub-orders will be fulfilled separately in its own provisioning systems. However, there may be dependencies in each sub-order - e.g. - an Internet sub-order can be fulfilled only when the Land line has been successfully installed, provisioned and activated in the customer premise.
Order orchestration

Order fallout

Order status management

See also [edit]

External links [edit]