 Provisioning is the staging process for service delivery. During this process, services are "designed and assigned" and records are updated to reflect the changes made to the network to deliver an ordered service. The network routes and serving equipment are reserved, relevant cross connects are ordered and any necessary network configuration or equipment installation tasks are assigned. At one time, this process was entirely manual. Today's provisioning applications are designed to automate and simplify network and service design processes, working hand-in-hand with order and workflow management systems. Provisioning systems are often rules-based, organizing the series of tasks necessary to deliver specific services into provisioning plans. For complex services especially, the provisioning process includes numerous steps and tasks. Services must be built from the bottom of the Chapter 2 - A Detailed Look at OSS network hierarchy up. For example, let's say a corporate customer orders a new, dedicated ATM circuit connecting two offices located in different states. The serving IIC would first have to configure an optical route, perhaps over multiple SONET rings, from one end office to the other to carry ATM traffic. Then virtual circuits would be configured on the ATM switches serving each customer location and a link from the customer's network routers to the switches would be established. This could require ATM network cards to be installed on the routers. The ATM switches would be cross-connected to the optical multiplexers serving the new optical route to complete the link. Each of these steps is first "designed" in the provisioning software, which lays out the plan for how the service will be configured, and updates inventory and/or configuration records to reflect both the changes on the network and note any equipment taken from warehouse inventory and placed into service. With this done, the workflow manager sends tasks to one or more activation systems to initialize those portions of the service that can b