vice is activated, the customer will be billed appropriately. The bill presentment function of the Web portal allows customers to retrieve bill information. To do this, the Web portal must retrieve billing information from the billing system. This synchronous integration can be achieved either in real time, by invoking the billing system's APIs, or asynchronously, by sending billing information to the Web portal as it is generated during the billing cycle. Policy Management. The Web portal is also used to allow the end customer to make changes to user profiles and other aspects of policy management, such as setting user IDs and passwords for ASP-type services. 4.3 Order Management and Provisioning Transactions Supplier Gateways. Depending on the type of service the IIC provides the order manager may need to interact with one or more suppliers. This interaction is ideally accomplished via electronic message interchange with the supplier. In the case of our hypothetical IIC, we have assumed an LSR gateway for ordering local loops from the ILECs. Many other types of gateways are possible, including ASRs, E911, LIDB/CNAM, PIC/CARE and equipment providers. Work Force Management. Once an order is accepted and validated, the order management and provisioning systems must assign tasks to one or more work force management applications. The key is getting the right person with the proper skills from the appropriate region to the specific network location. In many cases, physical components must be configured or added to the network to deliver service. The work force management system should be able to look at the components of a service and assign tasks in the correct order to the appropriate technicians. Network Activation. Once the physical components are in place, services can be activated on the network. A flow-through environment would take advantage of as much of the intelligence embedded in the network as possible. A network activation system, or systems, should be able to receive activation requests, follow instruc