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Product Management
Customer Management
Revenue Management
Services Fulfillment & Assurance
Resource Management
Product Management
End-User Devices
IT Platforms
Network Management

A highly competitive environment is driving Service Providers towards faster innovation with increasing price and margin pressures. It has forced them to focus on time-to-market and enhance their capability to quickly define, launch, optimize, and retire products and services. The resulting product innovation and pricing must also factor in what is feasible in terms of the network and service infrastructure, what is available, and how best to package it within the constraints of bandwidth and connectivity. In the complex world of convergent services, both network-based and application-based services need to be combined to provide the complete end-user offer. The demands of fast-changing customer preferences require the ability to create services and service bundles on the fly, and there is a fundamental need to have a well-defined, end-to-end way to manage products, services, and resources. This problem can only be solved by a systemic approach that uses a pre-integrated yet modular and standards-based OSS/BSS solution suite that takes into account the needs of all aspects of a Service Provider’s front and back office from lifecycle management to fulfillment to assurance.

The integral part of such a suite is centralized product information management, including an enterprise product catalog, and the associated Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution that allows Service Providers to:

NetCracker Product Information Management and PLM
NetCracker’s Product Management solution includes core functionality that covers the areas of Product Information Management and Enterprise Product Catalog as well as Product Lifecycle Management. NetCracker Product Management is an integral part of the NetCracker TOMS Suite and includes pre-integration with NetCracker Customer Management, Revenue Management, End-User Devices, IT Platforms, and Service Fulfillment components. This significantly reduces integration costs during implementation, brings necessary consistency of data and functions, and enables other beneficial opportunities.

Capability Overview
Product Information Management
  • Create re-usable product definitions, specifications, and bundles
  • Define product and service dependencies and constraints
  • Create and manage product business plan and assumptions
  • Define pricing and regulatory requirements
  • Collaborate / Import product information and capabilities for vendors and suppliers (or the network and data infrastructure)
  • Expose APIs / standards-based integration to BSS/OSS packages to auto generate and update product and service catalogs within those platforms where required
Product Lifecycle Management
    • Analyze and define target markets for products and services (retail, wholesale, business, government, SMB, etc.)
    • Analyze and define target geographies for products and services
    • Manage the end-to-end product and service development and launch process including:
      • Network deployments
      • OSS/BSS enhancements
      • Marketing campaigns
      • Regulatory and legal approvals
      • Development of operational processes
      • Internal and channel communications and training
    • Manage processes for product and service enhancements, re-branding, versioning, product retirement, and grandfathering
    • Analyze product and service performance and profitability
    • Provide management metrics and reporting on PLM KPIs (Product Development Status, Time to Market, Penetration and Growth, Profitability, Product Rationalization, etc.)
Benefits
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