Description and purpose:

Ordering and Order are broad terms that are often used to mean different things depending on the context of use. The TM Forum Integration Program (TIP) Ordering and Activation project will refine the definition of “Order” so that it can be thought of as a generic request for something with optional levels of management and tracking of the request. This will allow for examples such as simple untracked requests or more complex requests with sub-requests and detailed tracking of status.

Across the Ordering and Activation domain, a number of existing TM Forum specifications define aspects of Interface supporting Ordering and Activation. These include:

• MTOSI
• OSS/J Order Management API
• SID Business Interaction and Request ABE

The intent of the TIP Ordering and Activation interface project is to harmonize these input specifications into a common specification.

This project will:

• Analyze the input specifications (MTOSI, OSS/J etc)
• Collect and select use cases and requirements from various sources,
• Define a new Ordering and Activation Interface which can be applied to different domains in a flexible way, thus reducing the integration tax for Service Providers.

Orders will be defined to be both lightweight enough for simple uses and rich enough for complex cases (by means of optional elements and behaviors) so they can be used for all situations and offer a flexible standard approach.

The actual contents of an Order may be used for a wide range of business purposes. Activation is one particular use of Orders where the content may be instructions to activate something e.g. Products, Services or Resources etc. Other, non-Activation, uses for Orders should also be possible, including other TM Forum Integration Program operations (e.g. such as a Test request or Inventory query), thereby adding an additional level of management and tracking to the operation, and Business Services (Contracts/Tasks) operations. Hence Orders may be used to support a wide range of business processes (e.g. Assurance, Network Engineering, etc).

Ordering and Activation are the main elements of enabling services for customers. Whenever a customer makes a request for a service a request must be generated to instruct the many systems responsible for making the service available.

A request to activate some aspect of a service or resource can be considered as an Order. An order must contain all the information required to support the activation of the service or resource.

Standardizing the concepts of Ordering and Activation from an interface perspective brings many benefits in terms of reducing the time and effort in integrating systems required to play a role in enabling services. In addition the concept of the order provides a broad “language” of requests between systems whether they are within an Operator’s own domain or a third party domain providing some aspect of a service.