Taking the right approach for product catalog alignment

Most vendors propose a central-catalog driven architecture, to enable CSPs to become agile digital service providers with omnichannel capabilities, to quickly launch new services, bundles, offers, or generate new revenues from 3rd party services.

However, this approach implies a need for risky, costly and long transformation projects to simplify their BSS infrastructure and migrate all existing legacy product catalogs into a central product catalog.

This migration in turn delays the ability to gain new customers, generate new revenues, offer complex multi-play bundles or to launch multiple new brands.

Additionally, in case of Multi-Play offerings, including products which cannot be changed as they are part of externally provided services, the dream of only one central catalog will fail as those additional products cannot be included but only referenced.

But what if there was a much simpler approach to a catalog-driven B/OSS Architecture, to accomplish all of the same goals? An approach without the need for a major transformation project which often involves complex integration and data migration.

What if there was a much simpler and faster approach for CSPs to achieve digital transformation goals, to implement omnichannel, to quickly offer Multi-Play services?

“WE BELIEVE AND HAVE PROVEN IN SEVERAL IMPLEMENTATIONS THAT AN ARCHITECTURE BASED ON A CENTRAL COMMERCIAL CATALOG, INTEGRATED WITH MULTIPLE LEGACY TECHNICAL CATALOGS AND MULTIPLE BSS STACKS CAN HELP CSPS REACH THESE GOALS FASTER AND WITH LESS COST”

Legacy is tenacious

Sometimes business reasons do not justify moving all legacy catalogs into a central one. In some cases, it might be preferable for business reasons to keep 3rd party partner catalogs separate.

As CSPs consolidate, and are faced with integration of their operations, networks and systems, the existing legacy systems may need to remain in place for some time.

As market consolidation continues to take place, these situations will be more commonplace. Consolidating all legacy catalogs may not be a priority project or even the right strategy.

… And can be leveraged

CSPs don’t need to be limited by their existing legacy systems, complex processes and in turn delay reaching their business objectives. With an innovative approach, not focusing on a single catalog of the truth, or Catalog 3.0 as it is often dubbed, they can speed up their time-to-market for launching multiple bundles and offers, and still process them as one single order and one bill to the customer.

We believe and have proven in several implementations that an architecture based on a central COMMERCIAL catalog, integrated with multiple legacy technical catalogs and multiple BSS stacks can help CSPs reach these goals faster and with less cost.

Product managers are enabled to create and launch new bundled offerings quickly using a central product repository without the need to involve IT, reducing TTM from months to days. These new offers can be seamlessly and consistently offered either through separate brands, or under a single-brand across all channels including web, retail, telesales, and agents. Orders can be processed through a single, unified order management system simplifying the fulfillment and speeding up the delivery to the customer. Order errors can be reduced leading to reduction of associated costs and improved customer experience.

Even for multiple product lines

By combining a leading-edge order management system, CPQ, and omnichannel front-ends, a central COMMERCIAL product catalog driven B/OSS architecture enables CSPs to rapidly realize their omnichannel strategy with no major disruption to their business and existing legacy systems. The benefits are immediately visible as measured by faster TTM, increase in sales, improved customer satisfaction, reduction of average handling time, order fallouts, errors, and training time.

The BlueMarble Commerce solution was designed with this innovative approach in mind as a true end-to-end omnichannel multi-play solution for CSPs. This integrated Suite, specifically for telecom, cable, and media service providers, automates channel sales, order management, CPQ (product configuration, pricing, quoting) and fulfillment including one of the most complex business processes, reverse logistics.

It enables service providers to provide a seamless and consistent experience to their customers along their digital and physical customer journey, across all channels and customer touch points.