Inventory Management OSS

The inventory management OSS keeps track of all the physical, logical and other network assets, as well as the assignment of those assets to customers.

Need for automated inventory management system:

•As communications networks evolve into more complex service platforms with layered technologies and multi-vendor systems, it is imperative to have a simple, flexible, and consistent way to manage and to maintain how networks are configured.
•Telecom operators must maintain configuration records and without integration, these records rapidly become unmanageable being a mixture of paper files, spread sheets or in-house localized databases.

Benefits include

•Increases the quality of the data in the system, and minimizes the administrative burden of re-keying data
•It achieves flow through provisioning by integrating with

oPre-Ordering processes.
oService Provisioning
oService Assurance

The Network Inventory and Design subsystem brings together several vital functions –

1.planning and development,
2.intelligent routing, and
3.inventory management

In Inventory system, a carrier stores all its information regarding the inventory (facilities and equipment) available on its network.

Determine whether or not the requested service can be supplied.

Answers questions such as:

•Is the proper equipment in place or must new equipment be installed?
•Are the proper facility circuits-the high-capacity circuits that provide backbone transport-already assigned, or do they need to be configured?

Inventory management includes both:

•Inventory creation: Inventory creation refers to creating new network resources in the inventory in accordance with network growth forecasts.
•The provisioning of customer services utilizes powerful network

oProvisioning of customer services.
oInventory algorithms to design and assign network components, ensuring rapid and accurate service delivery.

Network Inventory Management system does network maintenance and restoration to maintain the operational integrity of the network.

Network inventory manager provides you with wide variety of powerful tools to document almost every aspect of your network

Network Circuit Design:

•The circuit design module designs many different configurations of the network before finalizing on the optimum one based on the service provider's strengths and weaknesses.
•These networks can be displayed graphically with drill-down capabilities to equipment, including routers and ports.
•The user has the ability to manage capacity at the link/connection level, as well as the equipment level, in order to support the provisioning of traditional and converged networks.’

•Rules-based Design functionality promotes following capabilities:

oDefine Logical Network Systems–You can specify a collection of elements that can be combined and arranged to define logical network systems and the services enabled by the networks.
oDefine Logical Network Templates–These templates allow you to define and maintain rules governing the ordering, design and provisioning of various logical network systems.
oDesign Connections–You can design connections for data, voice and video.In addition Graphical Layout Record (GLR) supports the design of physical connections.

•Circuit design is more related to the service delivery part as it involves configuration and design for providing a service to the end customer.
•The network inventory provides the service assurance part as it takes care of the network data, fault management and recovery from disasters.

Inventory Management system functionality:

•Standard interfaces to integrate with order management, customer care and provisioning etc.
•Web enabled solutions.
•Real time discovery of network elements and fault management.
•Client/server distributed architecture
•Scalability—integrate with server group to reduce database traffic, allowing more users to work expeditiously
•Sophisticated but easy-to-track system of network views
•Network configuration data represented by maps, drawings, symbols, and icons
•Dynamic, interactive relationship with hierarchical browser display and graphics window display, thus providing up-to-date physical locations and specifications in text and graphics
•Easily accessible vendor information on all network objects
•Built-in library of maps, locations, floor drawings, and network object symbols
•Management of network design stages and role assignments