Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS Customers Assurance and billing Fulfillment Sales (12A) (12B) Order management system Service Inventory provisioning and management configuration management Network Network/element provisioning and manager and configuration network elements Figure 20.6 Fulfillment process flow. development is restricted to one of these entities/spaces. For example when a new security router is envisioned, the services that can be offered on this router and the change in end customer experience should be evaluated to develop a product that can generate business. The different steps in a fulfillment process can be summarized as follows (see Figure 20.6): 1. First the sales and the customer have an interaction on the various service offerings. In this interaction, sales will provide details on available services and answer the queries raised by the customer. The result of this step is that the customer will be ready to place an order if there is any service that meets customer requirements. 2. In this step the customer places an order, either directly with the order man- agement system (2A) or places the order from sales (2B). After clarification of queries with sales on a phone, the customer places an order for a service pack- age with sales on the same phone call, then this would be an example of order- ing through sales. It is also possible that after the customer clarifies queries with sales, the customer logs onto the Internet and places an order online with an online order management system, which would be an example of direct order placed by the customer with order management system. 3. As part of placing the order, the customer and service related details are saved in the order management system. This information will be used for fulfillment, OSS/BSS Functions assurance, and billing functions. This step involves the order management system requesting the service provisioning and configuration module to acti- vate the service. 4. To configure the network and its elements, the service provi