S-O-B Shades of Blue

Shades of Blue participated in  a number of projects implementing Ordermanagement. The intention of the implementation of an Ordermanagement system was in all cases the same:

• a central, uniform cataolgue with defenitions of the products sold
• a channel independent system for intake and processing of an order
• an easy to modify workflow for ordervalidation and provisioning
• facilitate a high level of customer selfcare (web enabled), and customer communication
• deliver a single platform for CSR's to solve customer problems in a single call

The functionallity in general is split in four major functional building blocks:

1. Order Capture: fetch all details of the customer and the required offer
2. Order Validation: check if the provided information is valid (address, credibility, availability)
3. Order Fulfilment: shipment of goods, network configuration
4. Order Activation: activate and get the subscription billable.

The implementations were based on tailormade solutions as well as COTS (Ericson Order Care, ConceptWave). And implemented in Fixed line, Cable and Mobile operators.

The main challenges are typical for telco operators. The broad variation of applications in the IT landscape is a challenge. Currently Tibco (with any other implementation naming) is introduced as a glueware. Bringing new challenges, quite often having the effect of a deadlock, not enabling the loose coupling between systems. Harsch discussions with archtects and developers are common to get to a point where systems are operating autonomous and have and ESB as abstraction layer with simple operations as:

• Get_Customer: get the customer details as defined from all providing systems
• Modify_Customer: update the details in all source systems (normally the source systems should take care of updating their child/slave systems)
• Create_Customer: similar to Modify_Customer.

In essence we are back to the two/three phase commit discussion we had in the 90-ties, only not at table/database level but over applications.