er hand, a bakery must manage its physical inventory to realise optimally the value in its capital, which includes raw materials, baking oven and other requirements. In short, the physical inventory in a telecom network is a capital good that is not offered for sale as part of the service provider's day-to-day business operations. Only the service-carrying capacity of the physical network is offered for sale in day-to-day business. The role of a network infrastructure manager in network inventory will largely be to pull together the inventory information provided by a number of systems. That is, network equipment usually either comes with a network management sys- tem that is equipped with inventory management functionality for that network equipment, or the company that installed the network equipment will have pur- chased a management system that includes network inventory management func- tionality. The point will be that any given network will have network equipment from a multiplicity of vendors installed over a long time period. Hence there will multiple NMS. Therefore, a network manager's difficulty will often not begin with inventory management per se. Rather, it will be in managing network inventory management systems! Service providers who own and manage their own network infrastructure often use "swivel chair integration" which means that network managers literally sit on a swivel chair allowing them to switch quickly between the various inventory man- agement systems that are being used for the network. The humans do the pulling together of the information. Centralised information stores may exist in the form of spreadsheets, word processing documents, notepads and so on. It is easy to see that this is inefficient and expensive, and ultimately an inferior way of carrying out K. Misra et al. (eds.), OSS for Telecom Networks © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2004 OSS for Telecom Networks inventory management. Many companies now sell software designed to integrate multiple network inventory management sys