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Service Provisioning
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Customer Self-care
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Number Management
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Rebates and Payments
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Systems Support Services
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Number Management  Telephone numbers are not an infinite resource. To best manage this situation, OFCOM’s strict guidelines govern number conservation to ensure that operators make best use of their existing pool of numbers prior to the release of additional numbers. Operators that fail to demonstrate compliance can be denied additional numbering resources.
Furthermore, operators are required to demonstrate their need for additional numbers with quantifiable and substantiated calculations rather than finger-in-the-air forecasts.
A number inventory, often embedded within billing, provisioning, CRM and other home-grown systems, is no longer sufficient in demonstrating the requirement for additional numbers. Rather, there is a clear requirement for a separate Number Management System (NMS), designed to accommodate the very specific regulatory requirements.
Real Time has proven experience, assisting operators with design, development and implementation of their NMS to provide effective management of telephone numbers in line with OFCOM guidelines.
Foremost, an NMS provides effective management of the primary number states available, reserved, order placed, in-use, quarantined.
Configurable reservation expiry and service-specific quarantine expiry dates ensure that operator and regulator requirements are satisfied. Furthermore, OFCOM rules for sequential number block allocation avoid ‘cherry picking’ and fragmentation of available numbers.
An NMS primarily supports key business processes in sales and order management. However, the scope of an NMS can be extended to integrate with customer self-care components of service provisioning, such that the operator can effectively manage the numbers used by its customers and channel sales partners to fulfil self-administered service provisioning and service configuration changes. |