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Closing the Loop
Jim Shea
06/01/1999 Posted: 06/01/1999 Closing the Loop
Many legacy service providers have approached service fulfillment and service assurance with discrete solutions. They have invested heavily in operations support systems (OSSs) for fault management, performance management and testing without considering the integration of these systems until after deployment. Moreover, field operations and network operations traditionally have been regarded as independent organizations, with little attention paid to combining the efforts of these groups.
Since CLECs are building new networks from the ground up, they have an opportunity to design both their OSS architecture and their network operations processes for maximum efficiency and customer satisfaction. By considering these processes up front, CLECs can make OSS and equipment decisions with a focused vision in mind. A CLEC system architecture designed for service optimization will integrate service fulfillment systems with test-management systems for closed-loop provisioning (see chart, "CLEC Service Optimization," below). As a service is commissioned from order entry to equipment provisioning, the service is tested to validate performance.
After the service is provisioned, the CLEC must maintain the service and retain the customer. These requirements, which are known collectively as "service assurance," include performance, fault and service level agreement (SLA) management. The service assurance system must use the same database as the service fulfillment system to obtain information regarding the customer and circuit topology. Traditionally, service assurance has been considered a standalone process. However, to guarantee the highest-quality service and the lowest possible mean time to repair (MTTR), the service assurance function must be tightly integrated with testing and field problem resolution. There should be a process flow in which a network fault is detected by the service assurance system, tested via a remote test management system and then closed out via a field technician with a portable test instrument (see chart "Integrated Service Assurance," below). To maximize the efficiency of this overall process, these functions must be designed at the outset for interoperability.
Service Assurance A key enabler to this service optimization process is a service assurance system that is optimized for CLEC networks and provides a customer-centric approach to service management. Traditional network element management systems (EMSs) fall short in that they diagnose only a portion of the network. For example, transmission equipment EMSs (for digital cross-connect systems, add/drop multiplexers, etc.) provide information on the health of the transport portion of the network. Data-switch EMSs provide information on the health of the frame relay or asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. Router EMSs provide information on a specific customer circuit, but they do not diagnose faults that occur inside the network. Management approaches that place probes at the customer premises have similar limitations. A CLEC-optimized service assurance system provides an end-to-end view of a customer service. It communicates with multiple network elements and EMSs to obtain information about the entire service and potential failure points--both the transmission and data layers in the network. It encompasses multiple service and technology types, from DS-1 to synchronous optical network (SONET) and ATM to frame relay to Internet protocol (IP). It handles flexible service configurations and provides customization of SLA reports to meet customer needs. It also is designed to common object request broker architecture (CORBA) and object-oriented standards for ease of integration with existing databases and OSSs. "This type of 'optimized' service assurance would be welcomed by users," says Eric Hindin, director of data communications for The Yankee Group, Boston. "SLAs are not widely implemented and, even when they are, as is the case with frame relay, they specify too few service-quality parameters and too many exceptions to the parameters that are specified. Worst of all, the only assurance a customer has that a carrier will apply to the SLA is financial credits that don't come near to equalizing the money the customer stands to lose due to an outage. A portfolio that includes this type of service assurance system would go much further toward signing up a customer than any paper tiger SLA or promised financial credit ever could." A CLEC service assurance system must perform several key functions--performance management, fault management and SLA management--while focusing on CLEC-specific needs. Fault Management A critical function of a service assurance system is to manage faults and alarms from the network. Fault management quickly must identify root causes of service affecting hard and soft network failures. This process has been partially automated by some existing network management systems (NMSs) and EMSs. These systems typically gather information and filter it to cut down the avalanche of alarms that are activated when problems occur. The results and coverage of these systems typically fail to handle the scope and breadth of the CLEC's service offerings. Even with these existing capabilities, manual fault management frequently is required to correlate problems between domains. Without the proper system, many problems are not discovered until the customer calls the CLEC help desk to report trouble. A proper fault management system for the CLEC must provide automation, end-to-end network coverage, flexibility and a customer-focused graphical user interface (GUI). Automation is required to simplify the analysis of network problems. This automation allows a CLEC to reduce the time it takes to identify the network problems that could affect users' service and cause SLA failures. A full-featured monitoring and fault management system is critical to meeting SLA commitments, which, in turn, are key to CLEC differentiation in the marketplace. The fault management system also should be easy to use so the CLEC can quickly train its growing network operations center (NOC) staff and focus more experienced technicians and managers on complicated problems. Multivendor networks and multiple services must be supported so the CLEC can provide any service the user wants and use any network or network element to provide the service. In addition, the system must support fault analysis for customer premises equipment (CPE), such as a hub, router or channel service unit/data service unit (CSU/DSU), as well as the time-division multiplexed (TDM) and ATM/frame relay network. The system must support full end-to-end analysis of the network; otherwise the CLEC is once again left searching the unmanaged part of the network to identify root-cause faults properly. Finally, the system should integrate with a trouble ticket and work order management system. This integration allows the CLEC to fully automate the most labor-intensive processes of fault detection, isolation and tracking. The most important characteristic of the fault management system is a customer-oriented GUI. Traditional NMSs and EMSs focus on network management, not service management. Traditional EMSs require the system operator to search through the myriad managed network circuits to piece together what has happened in the network and who was affected. The best fault management systems not only present faults by the customer affected, but also provide a graphical depiction of the end user's entire service or virtual private network (VPN). This sort of system lets the CLEC provide customized services they can manage with one GUI and quickly drill down through the end user's service to identify what happened. Performance Management The second important function for a CLEC service assurance system is to provide proactive real-time and non-real-time tools for managing service performance. Soft faults such as bit errors, dropped packets and overloaded trunks do not always cause the hard failures and faults that are analyzed by a fault management system. However, these types of problems affect the performance of the end user's service and may affect the end user's business as much as any hard failure. These soft failures cause a large number of calls and service issues that affect the CLEC's relationship with the end user. The CLEC must be able to manage these problems proactively to maximize customer satisfaction. CLEC performance management tools, like fault management, must support deployment of flexible service offerings of legacy and data services over multivendor, multitechnology networks. Important performance management tools include real-time performance degradation alarms, periodic performance reports on circuits and trunks, special analysis and reports for repetitive problems and coverage for both network and service performance. Many vendors claim to have performance management capabilities as part of their SLA management tools. SLA management is a small but very important part of performance management. Real-time performance monitoring is even more important to good customer service than periodic non-real-time SLA reporting. The CLEC's performance management system should be able to identify problems that can affect the user's SLA as the problems happen. A system that can merely document how many times the SLA was violated succeeds only in putting customer service problems into the customer's hands, enabling the end user to claim rebates. Real-time performance management tools such as performance thresholds and alarms give the CLEC the ability to monitor service degradation as it happens and correct the problem before the customer is affected seriously or the SLA level is violated. Solid CLEC performance management systems also give the CLEC multivendor and multiservice support via a consistent set of tools and reports. The performance management system must be able to monitor the entire network from edge to edge. For standard ATM and frame relay services, the CLEC needs to monitor only the internal ATM/frame relay network and transmission networks. However, to provide differentiated services like VPNs and managed local area network (LAN) service, the CLEC must use a performance management tool that also can monitor CPE including routers, hubs and CSU/DSUs. Any system based on data from only one part of the network, such as CPE probes, forces the CLEC into a reactive mode in which it must again expend manual effort tracking down information from other systems to troubleshoot the service problem. Finally, the optimum CLEC performance management tools present information in customer-centric views. A customer-centric system allows the CLEC to quickly identify customers affected by network performance problems, prioritize customers affected by service problems and then quickly communicate this information to the customer through informed customer service personnel or even customer network management tools. SLAs have become a standard part of today's competitive marketplace. The challenge for CLECs is that the wide range of services they offer makes SLA management difficult. Customers may have different ideas about what is important and may request different SLA parameters from each other. Different services such as private-line service and frame relay may have totally different quality of service (QoS) measurements. Some customers may be willing to lease CPE equipment that provides the CLEC the ability to analyze the service level. Other customers simply want an electrical handoff to their own equipment. Due to the wide variation of services, service-quality measurements, CPE equipment and customer needs, the competitive carrier needs a flexible SLA management system. SLA management tools should provide customization of both the report format and the SLA parameters. SLA systems also must be able to support management of both CPE equipment and network equipment. An SLA management system does not provide the carrier a valuable solution if it can't support all of the carrier's customers. "Although carriers have invested considerable amounts of money and time to buy and develop network management systems, the only component that has truly won them new customers is monitoring systems that support SLAs," Hindin says. "But it is not enough to simply monitor the network and send reports describing problems after they have occurred. As the market becomes even more competitive, the carriers that succeed in the future will be those that excel at all aspects of service, from quick deployment to problem detection and fast resolution, and that create SLAs that cover all these aspects of service assurance."
Bringing It All Together Deploying point solutions for fault, performance or SLA management may fill short-term needs for service assurance, but an integrated system provides better long-term value for the competitive carrier. An integrated service assurance system that supports all three management tools can significantly lower the cost of ownership for these systems. A single system reduces information system (IS) support, cuts network management communications and improves tool integration to enhance the efficiency of customer service personnel. An integrated service assurance system gives the CLEC a competitive advantage by automating multiple processes to improve MTTR and reduce the time to identify problems. Finally, CLECs need systems that provide information visually by customer, not just a view of the network, so they can provide tailored customer care in a more responsive fashion than their entrenched competitors. Most importantly, a CLEC service assurance system is part of an overall service optimization process that includes test management and field problem resolution. This closed-loop process enables the CLEC to be confident of consistent test results between the test system and field portable instruments. It also provides the means for a significant competitive advantage over legacy carriers by integrating centralized network operations and field operations. The ultimate measure is customer retention. With systems and processes designed for maximum efficiency and customer care, CLECs can position themselves to win customers and retain them while controlling operations costs. Jim Shea is director of marketing for the systems and software group at TTC, Germantown, Md. He can be reached at (301) 353-1550 or sheaj@ttc.com.
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Most competitive local
exchange carriers (CLECs) today are focused on building new networks. Provisioning
equipment and installing fiber presents a tremendous challenge for startup carriers.
However, as CLECs provision customer services, their focus shifts to maintaining these new
networks and attracting and retaining customers. And customer care can be a key
differentiation.
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