Business support systems (BSS) are the components that a telecommunications service provider (or telco) uses to run its business operations towards customers. With operations support systems (OSS), they support various end-to-end telecommunication services (e.g., telephone services). BSS and OSS have their data and service responsibilities. The two systems together are often abbreviated OSS/BSS, BSS/OSS, or simply B/OSS. The acronym BSS is also used in a singular form to refer to all the business support systems viewed as a whole system. BSS deals with the taking of orders, payment issues, revenues, etc. It supports four processes: product management, order management, revenue management, and customer management.
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. Service providers require a single customer view and periodically 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 even be thought of as full-fledged customer relationship management systems implemented to help customer care agents handle the customers better and in a more informed manner. Revenue management focuses on Billing, charging, and settlement. It can take 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 OSS. Order management encompasses four areas: Order decomposition 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 - Landline, Internet, and Wireless - is broken down into three sub-orders, one for each business line. Each of the sub-orders will be fulfilled separately in its provisioning systems. However, there may be dependencies in each sub-order; e.g., an Internet sub-order is met only when the landline has been successfully installed, provisioned, and activated at the customer premises. Order orchestration is an objective application used by telcos to precisely manage, process, and handle customer orders across multiple fulfillment and order capture network. It helps in the data aggregation transversely from assorted order capture and order fulfillment systems and delivers an all-inclusive platform for customer order management. It has been in vast application in recent times due to its advanced and precise order information efficiency and low order fulfillment costs, thus aggregating lesser manual process and faster output. Its radical exception response-based functioning and proactive monitoring enable it to centralize order data accurately with ease. Order fallout, also known as Order Failure, refers to when an order fails during processing. The order fallout occurs due to multiple scenarios, such as downstream system failure, which relates to an internal non-data-related error, or when the system receives incorrect or missing data, which subsequently fails the order. Other Order Fallout conditions include database failure or error of network connectivity. Validation or recognition of order also occurs, in which the system marks the received corrupted order from the external system as failed. Another Order Fallout condition refers to the state of run-time failure; wherein a charge is inhibited from getting processed due to non-determined reliance. Order Fallout Management helps resolve order failures through detection, notification, and recovery process, enabling the order to process sustainably and precisely. Order management as a beginning of assurance is typically associated with OSS, although BSS is often the business driver for fulfillment management and order provisioning...
