art collecting reports on the services offered as part of the completed order and the billing solution to start billing the customer as per the SLA associated with the order. 12. Finally the order management system will directly update the customer (12A) or inform the customer through sales (12B) about the activation of the service package requested by the customer when placing the order. Before we move from fulfillment to assurance, let us look into the key vendors providing solutions for fulfillment process. Telcordia would probably top the list Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS with solutions for order management, inventory management, and provisioning. Telcordia is one of the major market leaders in network inventory management solution. Amdocs has fulfillment, assurance, and billing solutions. Cramer, which was the major competitor for Telcordia in network inventory management, was acquired by Amdocs. The huge market share of Telcordia can be attributed to its acquisition of Granite Systems. Metasolv and NetCracker are two other key vendors that have products on order management, provisioning, and inventory manage- ment. Some other popular vendors in network inventory management are Incatel, Viziqor, Axiom, and Syndesis. Sigma Systems and ADC are well known for their provisioning solutions. Amdocs is also a major player in order management. Eftia OSS Solutions is another well-known vendor for order management solutions. The vendors specified here are just a few of the key players in fulfillment space and this should not be considered a conclusive list. 20.3 Assurance Process The assurance process involves the set of operations used to assure that the services offered to the customer are meeting expected performance levels (see Figure 20.7). The "assurance" process embodies a range of OSS solutions to ensure that a net- work is operating properly and that service quality thresholds are maintained. Two main areas covered under assurance are problem handling and data management across customer, service, and 