Critical to achieving high order conversion, throughput and monetization rates in an automated fashion, service providers need immediate and comprehensive access to a customer’s existing portfolio inventory – the products they’ve ordered, the services that were activated for those products, and the resources that were provisioned for those services.
These various layers of portfolio inventory – customer product inventory, installed service inventory, and allocated resource inventory – are what inform the critical path order-to-activation-to-cash processing in every service provider.
For most service providers, however, much of this information is dispersed throughout their infrastructure in a fragmented and isolated fashion. This disarray of crucial data is, for example, a major cause of high levels of order fallout, leading to costly manual intervention and a degraded experience for both B2C and B2B customers.
Sigma Portfolio Inventory addresses these challenges head-on by centralizing the product-service-resource portfolio inventory data into a single master and then making that data widely available for access and management by any external system via a microservices-based API layer. It incorporates the same catalog-driven architecture that powers the Sigma products and adheres to the TM Forum Open API standards. By providing a single, unified data management platform, Sigma Portfolio Inventory complements pre-existing BSS and OSS applications, enabling service providers to manage a comprehensive view of what products and services their customers have based on orders fulfilled.
Catherine Michel, Chief Technology Officer for Sigma Systems, commented: “Sigma Portfolio Inventory represents the type of innovation Sigma typically brings to market – capabilities that solve chronic technology problems in a componentized and highly interoperable way. We don’t want service providers to throw away existing systems or to continue to custom code their way around the issue. We want to give them compelling and architecturally sound capabilities that unlock the business value of their data. As a result, far more orders are automated, with far fewer resources needed to fix errors during the fulfillment process.”
To learn more about how portfolio inventory data can be leveraged to reduce fulfillment costs, improve the customer experience and unleash new commercial possibilities, register for the Light Reading webinar entitled “Managing Portfolio Inventory Data with a New Approach” on November 9 at 10:00 AM ET.
For further information about Sigma Systems and getting Next Done NowTM, visit us at www.sigma-systems.com or contact us at info@sigma-systems.com.
About Sigma Systems (sigma-systems.com or Twitter @SigmaSystems)
Sigma Systems is the global leader in catalog-driven software solutions for communications, media, and high-tech companies. It serves over 80 customers in 40 countries with its award-winning products. The company’s portfolio spans enterprise-wide Catalog, Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Order Management, Provisioning, Insights and Portfolio Inventory products, and offers a core set of services including professional services, cloud services, and managed services. Sigma utilizes an agile approach to implementing its B/OSS products for its customers. Sigma has offices in North and South America, Europe and Asia Pacific, with technology and integration partners globally.