ault. Suppliers who may have to provide materials or equipment for repair of the fault or replacement of the relevant piece of infrastructure. Developers of third-party applications, which take correlated alarm information and process it in different ways for advanced alarm monitoring, SLA manage- ment or other purposes. Enterprise customers who wish to have real-time information on the network for whose capacity they have paid. The services offered by a partner service provider may be impacted by a network fault and so they might benefit from access to the alarm information. Partner service providers with whom there is an agreement in place such that network fault automatically activates capacity in the partner's network on a tem- porary basis. Unless information is generated in a standardised format and, perhaps more importantly, interfaces are standardised, most of the above information sharing would not be possible. Rather, information will have to be absorbed by staff, telephone calls will have to be made, deals done, notes taken on pieces of paper and so on. Eliminating this kind of inefficiency is a key goal of the TMF. An important first step to achieving this is standardizing - or at least achieving transparency in - processes of service providers. OSS for Telecom Networks Fulfilment Assurance Billing Customer Order Problem Invoicing/ Sales Handling Handling Collections Management Customer Care Processes Service Service Service Service Planning and Problem Quality Rating and Configuration Development Management Management Discounting Service Development and Operations Processes Network Network Network Network Network Planning and Inventory Maintenance Provisioning Development Management & Restoration Management Network and Systems Management Processes Figure 8.4 Fulfilment, Assurance and Billing (FAB) end-to-end process breakdown. 8.4 End-to-end Process Flow The objective of any service provider is to automate its processes to deliver value to its customers. Therefore, design and definition of the end-to