India Telecom

January 22, 2003
Automating business processes through SOM

BANGALORE -- US-based Wisor Telecom Corporation, a service order management company, is currently in talks with private telecom operators who wish to offer enhanced services for their subscribers. Backed by venture funds from the state of Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, Mid-Atlantic Venture Funds, Hickory Venture Capital and Early Stage Enterprises, it has a four-year-old development centre in Bangalore where a 45-member team works on its global products along with its other center in the US. Wisor clocked $4 million in 2000 and plans to end the current fiscal in excess of $12 million.

Three of the four leading carriers in the US are using its service order provisioning software. The company is now looking at enterprises. Large corporates with operations at multiple locations and a large requirement for telecom services could benefit from its service order manager in increasing their efficiency and reducing costs. It greatly eliminates overcharging for services billed but no longer in service by maintaining a corporate-wide service inventory of all telecom services.

Matt Costello, vice president-product management, Wisor Telecom, said: "When all the operators are offering fairly comparable services, the key differentiator would lie in the operator's ability to bundle products and features to suit changing market needs. With a very flexible back-end service order management system, the bouquet of services offered can be changed on the fly and there would be more efficiency."

MN Nayak, general manager, Wisor India, added: "We are looking at our service management solution (SMS – for enterprise) which enables large enterprises such as banks and insurance firms to manage and control communication services throughout their organisations." Wisor’s SMS solution provides a selection of products from the available options. These products could be from multiple operators. It helps in ordering products and services electronically.

Business processes broadly cover two categories -- pre-order management and order management. Pre-order management deals with automating the business processes involved in capturing customer details and assisting the customer in selecting available products and features. For instance, a customer desires to order a basic product, like a landline from an operator, along with several additional features such as call forwarding or caller identification. The pre-order manager displays the products available to the customer based on his needs and list out the features, which he could select along with a basic product.

The order manager automates the entire back-end processes and decomposes the order into several sub-activities. A powerful workflow engine then assigns the activities and alerts workgroups like linesmen and other staff to wire up the local loop, take up the building wiring, allocate the switch port, etc.

Wisor Telecom is offering two products for telecom carriers -- the service management solution (SMS) and the WisorGate, an e-bonding interconnection gateway.

The service management solution automates the processing and provisioning of customer service orders. This Web-based solution handles the complete order management functionality, right from the order entry to validating on to interconnecting with partners for service provisioning. Technology independent, SMS is capable of automating the business processes in ordering and provisioning of simple products to very complex, next-generation products.

Wisor SMS automates business processes based on the underlying knowledge template, which enforces the business rules. These knowledge templates can be built or modified very easily by business analysts as this does not call for programming skills. The fully scalable solution is built on state-of-the-art object-oriented technology. The user intuitive, intelligent, business rules driven Web interface for order entry supports a full range of convergent services. It has a pre-order and order entry for both on-net and off-net components, lists product features and availability, as well as a number of other features.

The scalable and modular WisorGate e-bonding interconnection gateway can be used as a powerful bridge between trading partners. It is useful in automating business processes when more than one operator offer complex services. It facilitates bundling of services across trading partners and ordering off-net components on trading partners. This enables the OSS to provision services when the activities are spread over more than one service provider.

Features include ordering on partners based on business rules, facilitating change orders, order revisions, order status and information exchanges, open XML APIs to integrate with the partners ordering systems.