Service providers are increasingly considering outsourcing their OSS and business processes, given the cost control and time-to-market pressures. Although OSS is a fundamental contributor to profitability, the demand for new services and applications, and the inability of existing systems to integrate with new systems are making it difficult for operators to manage OSS costs internally.

Until now, service providers have resisted outsourcing OSS as it was considered too significant and functionally strategic to be entrusted to a third party. However, legacy in-house systems have failed to keep pace with the rapidly evolving technology and accelerating growth in new services. In-house OSS is becoming unsustainable from both cost and performance perspectives. These pressures, combined with the need to remain efficient and competitive, make outsourcing OSS a viable alternative for service providers. Also, industry consolidation has led to the need for certain OSS functions to be shared across several operators.

Further, outsourcing OSS can help operators in addressing concerns like top line growth, cutting costs, increasing business efficiencies and improving the customer experience.

Advantages of outsourcing OSS

Outsourcing OSS can help service providers improve efficiency and streamline operations by reducing costs and time-to-market. Further, a managed services approach gives operators the ability to exclusively focus on their core businesses – sales, marketing and network services innovation. In addition, service providers can leverage ongoing vendor system and business process development (as well as regular system upgrades) for results-driven execution.

Service providers are gradually realising that an OSS managed services approach is the best possible way to achieve aggressive business targets of cost reduction, as well as ensure effective growth, innovation support and customer experience enhancement.

By outsourcing OSS, operators can overcome several internal organisational barriers to change, which they are bound to face when they undertake OSS modernisation and transformation. Moreover, end-to-end operational process improvements can be implemented more effectively by outsourcing OSS and business process management. Since OSS is outsourced under a governance programme, which is regulated by service level agreements, it helps operators save both time and resources in its management.

Earlier, operators experienced a similar dilemma with regard to outsourcing their BSS and network management functions to third parties. Since outsourcing these resulted in significant business benefits, operators are now keen on applying the same to OSS as well. Moreover, the baseline success factors for OSS are very similar to those for BSS and network managed services and, therefore, outsourcing best practices can be applied to OSS managed services as well. There are three approaches that can be considered for outsourcing OSS – as part of a broader network outsourcing activity, as a stand-alone managed services offering approach and as combined BSS and OSS managed services.

Key factors for OSS vendor selection

While outsourcing OSS, the service provider must ensure that the partner has adequate experience, skills and know-how to help maximise operations. The third party must have a broad experience in addressing operator’s needs such as reducing total costs and improving efficiencies of the end-to-end network operations life cycle. Further, the OSS vendor should be focused on delivering a superior customer experience to effectively handle the operator’s OSS. The operator must also ensure that the OSS provider has successfully executed complex transformation programmes with minimal risk in the past. The OSS provider must have expertise in network resource inventory and service activation systems, system consolidation and integration as well as managed services project management. The vendor should have comprehensive benchmarking services to measure the current OSS status. Further, to fully realise the benefits of an end-to-end OSS managed services solution, it is important that the OSS provider selected has extensive IT-centric and telecom-specific experience. The OSS provider must have experience in the following areas:

•Order-to-activation managed services – Expertise in the end-to-end order-to-activation process for all service types including all related business process operations and hosting services.

•Inventory managed services – Handling the end-to-end inventory management process, including data integrity management, network device type management, asset life-cycle management, and inventory data cleansing and migration. In addition, the vendor should provide application management services for all inventory systems as well as the related business process operations and hosting services.

•OSS application management – Adequate experience to enable effective development and use of OSS across planning, assurance, inventory and workforce management systems as per business and operational requirements.

Choosing the right vendor and the OSS managed services solution is crucial in order to mitigate the risks involved in outsourcing. Through this, service providers can reduce their costs, focus on their core businesses, increase their subscriber base and revenues, and modernise their systems. This, in turn, will translate into substantial savings for the operators.

Conclusion

Service providers today are recognising that an OSS managed services approach is a viable, and valuable, alternative to managing OSS. By outsourcing OSS, service providers can address their top line growth and profitability by freeing up resources in order to focus on their core businesses.

A well-planned and well-executed managed services approach to OSS by operators can lead to improved risk assessment and better cost control through a governance programme, and reduced lead time and time-to-market for delivering new and innovative services. Further, effective OSS outsourcing will result in a reduced total cost of ownership through operational efficiencies, quality improvements and business process optimisation, improved system performance and availability as well as greater service quality and an enhanced customer experience.

Based on an OSS Managed Services White Paper by amdocs.