Service Order Management – Part 2: Capturing and Validating The Order

Order Capture

To capture an order, we need to capture the subscriber details and their product choices. Subscriber information is extremely valuable when growing a business, as targeting subscribers for new orders is best accomplished when the offer made is based on their previous product and service choices.

Similar to offering services, order capture sounds relatively straightforward, but it may involve the integration of a number of components, including:

• Customer Resource Management (CRM) Platform
• Product Catalogue
• Order Management Server

Once we’ve captured the correct information from the subscriber, we need our systems to validate the order.

Order Validation

The next step is to validate the order, which involves:

• Confirm Order Legitimacy: Once the order is received, we need to confirm its legitimacy. For example, can the product or service be delivered to that address? This may mean different things for different products or services but it should be determined early in the service delivery process to ensure the best process efficiencies. In other words, there is no point in proceeding to any further step if the services cannot be delivered in the first place.
• Resource-Facing Service (RFS) Validation: An RFS is the definition of the service as required by the service activation system. In other words, an RFS provides the information that is needed in order to understand how to provision a service and a device. The RFS may also consist of a bundle of services. This step will break down the RFS into its component parts.

Validating the order may involve integration to the following components:

• Addressability Database
• Product Catalog
• Order Management Server

Now that we’ve captured and validated our subscriber’s order, we need to allocate resources and activate services. These critical processes will be covered in the next article.