Is OSS Worth its Weight? (cont'd)

It’s up to the OSS community to identify the units that make sense and provide a list as a basis for a common set of measurements. Feness and MetaSolv’s Sharpley each stated that the most revealing measurements for OSS involve the order-to-cash cycle and network expense reduction, but not necessarily revenue generation or cost of customer acquisition. Some of the examples they provide for common measurements include:

Order to cash cycle

• Periodically measure the timeframe needed to fulfill a service order and generate billing.
• Time and cost to provision
• Improvements demonstrate a reduction in the time to recognize revenue and thus increase revenue realization.
• Potentially the most critical OSS benefit from an executive's point of view.

Time to market for new services

• Measure the time from service conceptualization to launch and compare to historical data
• Measure how a distinct component affected the improvement

Accuracy of network data

• Demonstrate network data accuracy pre- and post-solution.
• Measure resulting benefits – such as order to cash cycle improvements and reductions in leased capacity.

Cost per order

• Measure pre- and post-flow through intervals and exceptions
• Identify areas where automation reduced or eliminated manual expense
• Identify relationships between order flow-through improvements and increased sales or customer retention statistics

Capacity Management OPEX and CAPEX Savings

• Reduction in expenditure for leased capacity
• Ability to decommission X-number of devices savings management costs and on managed-object based licenses

Service Assurance OPEX and CAPEX Savings

• Mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) before and after new solution
• Increase in availability of network as result of proactive maintenance
• Percentage reduction in truck rolls and resulting savings

Total Cost of Ownership

• Should address the ongoing cost of maintaining an OSS solution
• Identify incremental costs to expand in integrated environment
• Demonstrate how solution will influence expense controls for the business

Working Toward a Common Value Proposition for OSS
To put the measurements in context, OSS needs a common value proposition. Once the sector agrees upon and promotes a shared message, vendors can differentiate based on how they deliver some aspect of the common value. Willetts has been arguing for some time that telecom carriers need to look to other industries to draw parallels that can help set an appropriate context.

“What we need is to borrow ideas from other industries which have got very high levels of automation, lower cost bases, and higher levels of service and customer self care,” he says, pointing to Toyota and Dell as examples of company's that are flexible and highly profitable as a result of applying high levels of automation. OSS should be a priority for executives with fixed line carriers, Willetts says, because they all face declining prices and revenues and must achieve similar automation benefits to cut costs and increase margins. Thus far, cost cutting has focused on layoffs, “but at some point [carriers] can't squeeze anymore out of what they've got,” he says.

With fewer people being asked to do more, the only way to reduce costs further is for carrier operations to be made less redundant, more all-purpose, and more automated. The ability to be agile and flexible at a low cost while delivering new services is critical to survival – and is an advantage cable companies have over telcos. Wiletts argues agility can give a carrier “the ability to price services wherever it needs to compete.” Further, it allows a carrier to battle “not just on price but on feature competition,” he says.

In the end, the biggest challenge is delivering the value message to the right audience. “When you talk to CEOs (about OSS ) you see the ‘ah-ha' factor,” says Willetts. “They say they didn't realize how important it was, and that they thought it was something engineers dealt with in the depths of the company.” This kind of enlightenment has not occurred enough. While there may be six or eight carriers that embrace OSS as a strategic priority and 20 others that are beginning to do so, there remain hundreds that do not.

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