Procurement

As service providers strive to improve business efficiency they need to procure standards based OSS and BSS solutions that can be rapidly integrated and work seamlessly in multi-vendor environments.

TM Forum provides a family of procurement best practice guides and recommendations that service provider members can use to specify required business processes and information models. This greatly reduces the time taken to create RFx documents and evaluate them to ensure that the solutions offered meet the integration and interworking requirements.

We recommend you take TM Forum education courses in order to use these tools effectively.

You can make use of the following resources:

• The Introduction to Procurement Support Templates document (GB946) provides a high-level introduction to vendor selection and procurement.
• The Procurement Support Process and Templates document (TMF062) extends this by defining a process for the production of the RFx document as well as covering Application, Business and Integration Framework requirements.

The Procurement Support templates include the following: 

• Process centric template
• Information centric template
• Application centric template

Additional templates are also provided for:

• Overall Solution Requirements
• Existing Applications Integration Requirements
• Application Integration Requirements
• Product, Service, Resource Requirements

Please go to the Resources area to download the above reference Procurement Support documents.

Favoring products and solutions that are certified to be TM Forum conformance certified further streamlines procurement.  By aligning RFx templates and responses with the outputs from Conformance Certification, both service providers and suppliers can remove risk from the procurement process and significantly reduce the cost and time required to issue and respond to an RFx.

Supporting our Members