tivation: Provisioning and activating the service is a key activity of the service provider for order fulfillment. Dedicated service provisioning and activation applications are used by the service provider to Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS enable flow through provisioning. Once the order is captured in the order management system, information on the services requested by the customer is passed to the service provisioning module. The provisioning module identi- fies the resources that can be provisioned by interacting with inventory man- agement. The allocated resources are then provisioned, which also includes network provisioning for setting up the infrastructure to support the services. After network level provisioning is successfully completed, the service provi- sioning performs the required configuration to set up the parameters to be used when activating the service. Finally the service is activated. A validation module checks if the service activation is successful and the subscribed ser- vice is ready for customer use. The service provisioning module also informs the order management module that the order is successfully completed and triggers the billing subsystem to start billing the customer. 6. Service configuration management: Service configuration management involves configuring the resource components of a generic service built for a customer or a class of customers. After basic installation of components for operating a service, the specific parameters to be used while operating the service needs to be provided. Configuration applications put in the relevant values for offering the performance guaranteed by the customer SLA. Usually a centralized configuration application will do the configuration across appli- cation modules that deliver the service. Having distributed configuration managers is also common in service provider space. A generic service build will have a set of customizable parameters that are configured based on the customer subscription. 7. Service design: At a process leve