f advanced SDH equipment such as the Fujitsu Lightwave Cross-connect and Digital Microwave Radio. FLEXR Plus accesses the entire network through an X.25 interface to the packet switched network or an interface to a local communications network/Ethernet. Once connected to a single Fujitsu network element, FLEXR Plus gives the user access to all other Fujitsu SDH elements in the network via the SDH data communi- cations channel. This allows provisioning, performance and alarm status monitor- ing of up to 1000 network elements. The FLEXR Plus displays a network map with equipment and network icons to assist in isolation of alarms and retrieval of status information. Provisioning can be done using point-and-click. To simplify the creation of work performance records, FLEXR Plus can store log files. We shall see details of how log files are used in AdventNet OSS products. 36 ESRI is a geographical information systems (GIS) company that was established in 1969. OSS for Telecom Networks Some OSS vendors include inventory management under the head of configura- tion management. For example, Clarity's Configuration Manager product manages telephone number creation and allocation, and also supports logical and physical configuration of telecom networks. The product also integrates network elements and network element management systems. 10.11 Functionality of Inventory Management Product An OSS product with inventory management functionality such as Clarity's Config- uration Manager can interface with other OSS such as materials management and geographical information systems, and can track physical network inventory data such as: sites, customer, carrier, common and interconnect manholes, network access points, network elements (NEs) wireline and wireless transmission equipment. Clarity's approach to network inventory OSS supports the network inventory items listed in Table 10.1. We discuss some of these features in more detail in Chapter 11. However, many of the features are also relevant to inventory management. To defi