End-to-end order management systems will improve the customer experience – and service providers' bottom line
April 5, 2011
The role of an order management (OM) system is to act as the orchestrator and control point in a provider's back- and front-office systems, enabling the myriad components in the service value chain to work in unison. The ability to decompose high volumes of commercial orders into specific components and send out network parameters at optimum speed in a specific sequence based on rules and policies is a critical scalability benchmark.
Because of their central role in the service fulfillment process (combined with the increasing demand from customers, suppliers, partners and business operations), existing solutions have become a pain point for all providers.
An end-to-end OM solution should be able to eliminate some of the most pressing business and financial problems in a service provider's fulfillment processes. These include process inefficiencies that result in:
High operating costs: Inefficiencies in the overall sales and provisioning OM processes, such as manual processing, order fallout, etc., leading to higher operating costs.
Longer time to revenue: Manual processes that increase order fallout and delay provisioning resulting in lengthening the order-to-cash cycle, delaying revenue recognition.
Lost customer opportunities: Order process errors that lead to inaccurate provisioning of services, excessive delays or poor service increase the likelihood that a customer will change service providers. OM solutions play a critical role in reducing some of the high operating costs and lost revenue opportunities.
Typically, a service provider's OM process encompasses three different business functions: sales OM, service provisioning and supply chain. These functions are often served by different OM solutions – either commercial off-the-shelf or custom-built. Inefficiency in the overall OM process increases the operational costs for service providers, which negatively impacts their bottom line.
In our view, an end-to-end OM solution should be a standards-based solution that is tightly integrated to other fulfillment, billing, customer care and assurance systems – improving order flow from order capture through billing, and providing order process analytics that offer insight into specific customers' orders and process bottleneck.
There are significant investments happening in the OM market today. My upcoming Heavy Reading report on OM – "End-to-End Order Management: The Mobile Operator Opportunity" – will explore the critical role of OM solutions in the mobile industry. The report explains in depth how business process management (BPM)-based, custom-built OM solutions cannot meet the changing needs of mobile operators, examines the views of operators regarding their existing OM solutions and their wish lists for future solutions, and explores how the B2B and supply-chain strategies of mobile operators can be streamlined with end-to-end OM solutions.
The report also analyzes the products and strategies of 13 key OM vendors in the communications market. Vendors covered in this report include: Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX), Cerillion Technologies Ltd. , CGI Group Inc. (NYSE: GIB; Toronto: GIB.A), Comptel Corp. (Nasdaq, Helsinki: CTL1V), ConceptWave Software Inc. , Convergys Corp. (NYSE: CVG), Netcracker Technology Corp. , Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), Pegasystems Inc., Sigma Systems , Sterling Commerce Inc. , Subex Ltd. and Telcordia Technologies Inc.
— Ari Banerjee, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading
Heavy Reading's End-to-End Order Management: The Mobile Operator Opportunity will be published on Monday, April 11. For more information on this report, please contact:
Dave Williams
Sales Director, Heavy Reading
858-485-8870
[email protected]
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