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Why you should separate technical services and products in your network

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As an open access operator with service providers offering to sell their services in your network, you probably have made decisions on how to promote these services to end users (customers) or customer support. 

This process can often lead to multiple redundant services for each service provider, services that, for the network operator, could be seen as the same technical service. Multiple redundant services might mean separate setups for the provision of each service, maintaining a duplication of configurations. All of these technical details possibly result in additional overhead for manual input whenever only one service needs changes. A possible scenario causing this situation: each service provider has the same type of service; only the names have to be kept separate in order to know what to order. 

Another scenario might be that there is a need to present special offers or campaign items. Let’s say that you want to offer a service without a starting fee or the first month for free. The offer might come with different terms and details like only being available for a limited time. Such offers only differ in business terms and, from a technical point of view, result in the same end service.

Another case promoting the separation between service and the orderable product could be, for example, you want to offer Internet 100/100 but have different access technologies in different parts of your network, e.g., Fiber, Radio networks, Cable-tv. But for the customer, there is no real need to know how they are getting the service, just what they get. 

With all these possible pitfalls, why not use the power of separation between technical services and products that you want to sell?

This separation can be achieved by adding an abstraction layer for your products. Netadmin Nine offers this distinction, with the product catalog within the order management capability.

 

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By building a structure on top of your technical services, you may even allow different service providers to offer only a subset of their services.

For example, we at Netadmin have used this separation of orderable products from the technical services to offer bundles of services, without creating new services.

The separation of your technical services from your products that are presented as orderable offers has many advantages and possibilities. Easily extend your portfolio with a new service provider, with less maintenance overhead, and have a way to structure limited offerings such as campaigns.

 

 

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