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General Description

Fulfillment Provisioning is an interface between service management applications and service elements. Service management applications define and drive the creation of new services at the operational level. Service elements activate these services at the network level.

Figure 1. Fulfillment Provisioning intermediates between management applications and service elements

Service Management Applications

Service management applications are used to define and create new services at the operational level. Such applications typically consist of customer care and billing systems that create service requests which require the following types of operations on a service:

•

Creation

•	Activation

•	Modification

•	Suspension

•	Deactivation

•	Interrogation

•

Deletion

Requests that arrive from these applications are generally in an external format. One task of a Fulfillment Provisioning application is to translate such requests into the internal service order format.

Service Elements

Service elements activate the services requested by management applications at the network level. Service elements consist of different types of network elements and network element managers. These elements are used to provision and activate the services requested by the management applications. Typical service elements include the following:

•

HLR

•	PSTN switches

•	Intelligent Network platforms

•	Voice mail systems

•	E-mail systems

•	WAP gateways

•

Routers

•	Data element managers

•	Authentication servers

•	DSL equipment

•	UMTS network

Fulfillment Provisioning

About this task 

Fulfillment Provisioning fulfills a service order in the following sequence:

Procedure 

1.	Fulfillment Provisioning receives the service order from the service management application and then parses it into an optimized internal format.

2.	The service order passes through a series of modules that validate the order, enrich the data in the order, and attach and sequence the tasks required to implement the order.

3.	Tasks are translated to cartridge commands and sent to the respective cartridges for execution.

4.	When all necessary tasks are complete, Fulfillment Provisioning consolidates its results and composes a response to the initial service order. This response is then sent back to the service management application that initiated the request.

If errors occur anywhere in the provisioning and activation process, Fulfillment Provisioning rolls back partial work to an acceptable state. While this provisioning and activation process is taking place, you can administer the process through the web-based user interface. Administration capabilities include operational control, system configuration, alarm management, log access, and system upgrades.

Copyright © Cloud Software Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved