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Telecommunication service providers and operators and service providers in other verticals are facing challenges when producing and deploying new products or upgrading existing products. The time-to-market is very slow because of the complexity and volume involved in the enterprise catalog.
The Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC) solution is designed to help Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to deliver innovative, profitable products at a lower cost and in less time. Other industries such as utilities, water, and retail can implement the same solution as their key enterprise catalog management application integrated with their core billing application.
The Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC) solution helps communication service providers (CSPs) create and maintain their product catalogs in a user-friendly and cost effective way. The solution ensures the accuracy and quality of the product catalogs and significantly reduces time to market. With EPC, CSPs can place products at the heart of their business. Featuring an easy-to-use collaboration environment for business and IT users alike, EPC provides CSPs total control over their product data and processes.
EPC takes previously inconsistent practices and products and consolidates them into a single, unified catalog with up-front, role-based access and back-end system interoperability. The result is a multidimensional, cross-product, and channel catalog that sits at the heart of the CSP’s order-to-install process. This catalog can help improve time to market, reduce the cost to market, and improve innovation and quality.
EPC enables a flexible hierarchical structure to suit any vertical. It has a powerful rules engine to dynamically differentiate product properties such as price and presentation and to enforce overall product selection rules. Sophisticated cross-product or cross-vertical bundling can be achieved using the hierarchical structure and the rules engine.
EPC is powered by a shared product catalog. The shared product catalog uses a metadata-driven approach to accommodate all of the incarnations of a product, from an idea to the physical implementation in the customer’s hands. EPC is designed with TMForum SID in mind. It supports all levels of product definitions, including offers, product specifications, services, and resource specifications.
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Offers are designed by Marketing, sold to particular channels, customer segments with specific pricing.
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The Product Spec is created by Product Management and describes all of the product components.
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Using Order Management, the Product Spec is translated into the various technical and manufacturing spec products. These products are tuned for each of the downstream systems that use them.
EPC and the SID/TM Forum Model
Aligning with the SID/TM Forum model (Frameworx), EPC supports different levels of product definitions, including offers, product specifications, services, and resources. Marketing teams can design product offers for sale to particular channels and customer segments with specific pricing.
The Product Spec Layer is the commercial view of what the business sells. Product management teams define the product specification, which describes all product components: Product name, code, attributes, other commercial characteristics, service-level agreement (SLA), download speed, and physical aspects, such as size and color. The product specification can have a business hierarchy with child products.
Order Management translates the product specification into technical and manufacturing spec products tuned for the downstream systems that use them. The commercial view can be translated to the service and the underlying technical resources.
Customer Facing Service Spec Layer
The next level is the Customer-Facing Service Spec (CFSS) Layer, which includes technical products and technical services. Multiple products can use the CFSS Layer, for example, a broadband internet service requires a port and an authentication service to deliver the product.
Resource Facing Service Spec Layer
The third layer is the Resource-Facing Service Spec Layer, which supports the CFSS Layer. For example, this layer can include equipment, cable attributes, access port, trunk, and other attributes, typically to support the network.
The last layer is the Physical/Logical Resource Spec Layer, for physical resources such as phone number, IP address, POP, local loop connection ID, physical cable. These aspects are allocated to the customer. These concepts are important, especially from a data-modeling perspective. For more information, check the TMForum website.
