rdia 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 management. Web-based solutions: Most inventory management solutions currently avail- able in the market are Web based or support Web launch along with the ability to be launched as a separate application. The reason for this is that most operators want to have the flexibility to work on inventory manager from anywhere, which is possible when the solution is Web based and can be launched with a Web browser to which data can be sent using the Internet infrastructure. Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS Scalability: The huge volumes of inventory data and associated reports lead to an inventory database that can scale easily. The storage requirements should be planned properly when deploying an inventory management solution. Ease of use: The inventory inf