is made available to a customer after it is sold. Hence the necessity of the work in a service order being recommended by a knowl- edgeable employee. The name of the person making the recommendation is given along with the date on which the recommendation is made. OSS for Telecom Networks The name of the person responsible for reviewing the service order is recorded along with the date. The name of the person responsible for approving or reject- ing the service order is recorded with the date of their decision. If they rejected and hence cancelled the service order, then the reason for cancellation must be recorded. A service order will typically have work involved for which there is a charge, and so the Billing Group must be advised. Of course, the service itself will certainly be charged for. The date on which the Billing Group is advised is recorded. The date on which the billing is activated is also recorded. This will be done following an advice from the Billing Group. The service order feature of a service management OSS application should pro- vide an item list for the service order together with costing for each item. The serv- ice order feature should also allow service attributes to be specified. A link to the appropriate tools may be provided from the service order screen. This will allow software-based work that is specified in the service order to be conveniently carried out immediately. For example, the Clarity Service Manager allows the Circuit Diagrammer application to be opened from the service order screen. If the project to which a service order applies changes or if the service order is no longer needed in a particular project but happens to be just right for another proj- ect, then it can be moved to other projects with a single click. The ability to copy service orders would be desirable and is not difficult to add to a service manage- ment OSS. A service order can be directly linked to a product domain record or the service order can be linked to a service group record which is then associa