s ensuring that the various manage- ment functions involved in provisioning are executed properly. Tracking helps to identify errors or issues that are raised during provisioning SO that the same can be posted to an administrator for taking corrective action. Managing involves interaction with other modules, for example if a par- ticular element in a network is identified as faulty, the same needs to be communicated to the inventory management system for allocating a new replacement element and once network and service provisioning is com- plete, the order management system needs to be informed to close the request. Issue reports: The reports issued in network provisioning are quite differ- ent from the FCAPS reports in maintenance. The reports issued in net- work provisioning is intended to provide interested parties, information on the status of provisioning, efficiency achieved with current configura- tion parameters, total time for provisioning, elements that failed and the operation that caused failure, and SO forth. This would mean that the pro- visioning reports are customized reports for a specific audience unlike a maintenance report. Recovery of element: Similar to allocation of resource, the unused resource or element needs to be deallocated for use in satisfying a new order or as a replacement for some faulty element in an existing order. The process of issuing a deallocation request, getting proper authorization, performing the deallocation and reallocating the same for some other order is performed as part of recovery of element. In addition to understanding the functions performed by the network provi- sioning module, it is also important to have an understanding of the modules that Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS interact with network provisioning. The main modules that interact with the net- work provisioning module are: Service configuration: This module is intended for configuration of ser- vice that can only be done once the underlying network to support the ser- vice is provisioned. So t