OSS / BSS

What does the operator needs in order to do business?
To start with customers and a market to serve of course! that means a geographical area with people living in it.

This area needs to be covered by a network,

today more than 40 % of the world's mobile traffic goes through Ericsson networks.

But what do operators need to do to make their business a success?

Control costs? Find new sources of revenue? Provide a better customer experience?
The answer is yes, all of these things in fact and they all come together in the processes and systems that keep an operator's business in business.

Operations Support Systems and Business Support Systems or OSS / BSS.

One thing we have learned about telecom over the past 130 years is that it's always evolving.

So working with OSS and BSS means always adapting, changing, fine tuning, improving and updating. it's means knowing exactly what's going on from one end to the other, through all the network elements and it's not just in mobile networks but all the parts, fixed and mobile, that make up the Networked Society.
A network needs to be planned in order to work at it's best.
it may need to cover mountains, forests, lake, small towns and big cities on order to reach every customer, then the network needs to be built.

And then once it's built, someone decides to construct eight new skyscrapers, a business park and a football stadium in the city. So even after the network has been planned and built there is optimization a process that never really ends.

Getting people started using all the things the Networked Society can offer -> like calling, texting, watching news, twittering and so on.
on all sorts of devices, fixed and mobile in all kinds of locations is called fulfillment.

This involves getting all the different parts of the network, delivered by different vendor and all those services to work together to communicate.
Then imagine that suddenly for some unexpected reason a base station goes down.

These guys here in the Network Operation Center can pickup the slightest disturbance in the network.
Their role in the chain of operations is called assurance, we call all of this OSS.

But operators also need to make money, it's a business after all. They need revenue management.
So to look after the girl with a post-paid subscription and the guy with a pre-paied card,there have to be mechanisms for billing and charging in place.

These insure customers pay the correct rate for different services at different locations at different times.

for example - if a customer has used up all the data has paied to receive the data rate automatically drops,the subscriber gets a notification and invitation to purchase more data at a higher speed.

When customer need to get a hold of their operator maybe to change their address, ask a question or report a fault they need to turn to customer support.
applications to handle this dialog are called Customer Relationship Management or CRM.

All these systems the ones that looking after the business are referred to as BSS.
Ericsson has been doing all this for operators for 130 years.
but the complexity and the scale of today's multivendor networks and service offerings are staggering.
and with 50 billion connected devices expects around the world by 2020.. let's just say it won't get any easier.

A handful of brilliant engineers in a room full of maps that's how network planning was handled 25 years ago.

Today it's all automated the systems and applications constantly being optimized to handle problems in the networks.
Enormous volumes of data need to be processed analyzed and translated into ways to improve the customer experience.

The main focus of Network Operation Centers used to be keeping base stations up and running,while today they focus more on the actual services passing through the network.

So these days they are often referred to as Service Operation Centers.

Customers calling for support don't want to wait for answers on why something isn't working or how much data they are allowed to download or to find out about their invoices.
Operators need to have complete end to end overview and control of the information in real time, they need to have answers ready before the customers even call customer support.

OSS and BSS it's about finding the best ways to run a network and the best ways to run the business.

For Ericsson it means having complete and constant overview.

For Operators it means Ericsson helping them improve their bottom line.

For customers in the end it's all about creating a better experience.