Project - Simplified Service Catalog Management

Transforming telecom with TM Forum-Standard Service Catalog Management

The service and product catalogs are at the core of the operator's business. In the competitive fiber market and the evolution of new and renewed business models within B2B, B2C, and B2B2C (wholesale), choosing catalog solutions that are up to the task is crucial. Whether wholesale, B2B, or retail, time-to-market has become more critical than ever. In addition, adopting ODA (Open Digital Architecture) and moving to cloud technologies will make many operators reevaluate their existing catalog solutions, looking for modern and flexible solutions that fit into the future landscape of telecommunications.

Within this project, we are enhancing our service catalog management, bringing it into the new era of telecommunications. Adopting TM Forum standards in our service catalog models ensures interoperability and standardization with other industry applications and processes. Our top-notch service catalog promotes reusability and consistency across technologies and service types and enables massive consolidation of service types sharing the same characteristics.

The keywords are flexibility and simplicity. This combination will not only allow for a quicker launch of new types of consumer services and product offerings but also lower the cost of maintaining and operating the system over time. This is especially important for new and emerging fiber operators who are trying to break into the market by beating the traditional telcos through speed and tailored product offerings. In the wholesale sector, onboarding new service providers with minimal effort and avoiding unnecessary large catalogs is crucial.

The following key features are enabled in our upcoming release:

Reducing the time to launch new consumer services and onboarding of new RSPs by always promoting the reusability of service specifications.
Minimize the size of the service catalog by enabling the consolidation of service types through clever configuration.
Ensuring a coherent and efficient user experience for simplicity and efficiency.
Align with TM Forum standards and models, including using service characteristics to enhance interoperability and the implementation of Open APIs.
Allowing multiple service catalogs, organized according to TM Forum standards, to better manage different businesses, technologies, and partners.
Improved dependency policy and availability configuration, making setting up restrictions and dependencies on services easier.
Simplifying the creation, configuration, and migration of service specifications, product offerings, and characteristics through enhanced import/export, API, and batch support.
Smart validation tools ensure the correct configuration of the service catalog, products, and services.
Updated service ordering process, leveraging service characteristics' advantages for automatic and manual configuration and validation of services.

illus-serviceCatalogManagement-2

This project is closely connected to specific TM Forum domains and associated API specifications, including:

Project - Standardizing Wholesale Broadband - Fibre Access (BFA)
TMF633 Service Catalog Management
TMF641 Service Ordering
TMF620 Product Catalog Management
TMF622 Product Ordering

Our updated catalog structure is built to promote standardization, reusability, scalability, and efficiency. Combining a TM Forum-compliant information model, enhanced UI/UX, and intelligent tools for rapidly creating, reusing, updating, and migrating service types will offer a completely new user experience and overview of the operator's product and service catalogs.

This project is crucial to our TM Forum ODA and NextGen Order Orchestration & Service Activation Journeys, supporting operators in entering the new telecom era.