ance of new service. 4. An interface to the end-user equipment. 5. Billing and SLA reporting. 6. Workflow management, which includes ongoing process monitoring, and updat- ing and improving the provisioning process: recommend procedural, organisa- tional and operational changes to the telecommunications provisioning process with the objectives of reducing the associated cost, time delay, personnel and inefficiencies. 6.2 The Provisioning Bottleneck Provisioning was once a labour-intensive process involving many systems and peo- ple. However, many parts of a given provisioning process can be largely automated. For example, in the optical domain, new transport technologies allow bandwidth provisioning times to be cut from months to days. The opportunity for OSS vendors is in lifting rapid provisioning from network capacity to entire services. A service provider can gain a competitive advantage with fast service activation. Of course, once some service providers gain this ability, there is a competitive pres- sure on all service providers to follow. In achieving rapid service provisioning, infor- mation transfer can be complex because services may span multiple carriers. Many predict that customers of the future will be able to order services online and request changes to their services online. Indeed, as long ago as late 2000, the 6 Service Provisioning and Activation California-based software vendor Xacct was doing brisk business in the USA and Asia in selling the front-end web interfaces for customer self-provisioning. 12 For example, a customer with geographically dispersed offices requiring additional bandwidth for a company-wide videoconference will seek to be able to order and turn on the service with little notice to the carrier. This is similar to how a customer can order a voice conference service today. The carrier would then create the service and apply the change to the current billing cycle. 13 With growth in data services and strong competition for customers, carriers and service providers need manage