fter provisioning or failures during provisioning. Inventory hence is a key module and needs to be automated for quick provisioning without manual inter- vention. The quality of work is also improved when the administrative burden in managing inventory records are performed by an automated inventory manager. On a single click, the IM can provide the operator information on whether proper equipment is in place to offer a specific service or new equipment needs to be installed. The links and capacity circuits that provide backbone transport can be checked and assigned. Commands to provision systems to do configuration can also be triggered from the inventory management system. There are many vendors who specialize in inventory management products. Telcordia is one of the market leaders in network inventory management. Inventory management can also be a bundled solution offered as part of a complete OSS solution suite. OSS/BSS Functions Purchase and sales management Provisioning Order management management Inventory management Network managers Network managers Element Element Element managers managers managers Transport Access Circuit elements elements elements Figure 20.5 Interactions with inventory management. An inventory management system is expected to have the following features: Standard interfaces: The inventory management system should have stan- dard interfaces to easily integrate with modules like order management, customer care, and provisioning. MTNM/MTOSI is an example of inter- face standards defined by TMF (TeleManagement Forum) for inventory management. Dynamic discovery of network elements: When a new element is added to the network, the inventory management system should discover the new element and update the inventory database with attributes of that element. In addi- tion to performing dynamic discovery that falls under configuration manage- ment, the inventory management system also can collect logs on inventory status, to update its database thus performing activities that fall under fault ma