Open APIs

Hello,

I am writing on behalf of one of telcos. We offer multiple mobile offers. Some for prepaid customers, some for postpaid ones. Prepaid customer can change current mobile plan to postpaid plan. In product catalog, every prepaid plan is different offers as well as postpaid plans. If prepaid customer changes current plan to postpaid plan, current product instance's status will be deactivated. Also, all provisions will be changed. I just want to know how I should register these offers. Only one of the mobile offers can be activated. If customer chooses new mobile offer, current mobile offer will be deactivated.  I have mobile offer category. In the category, prepaid and postpaid child categories exist. In each child category, offers are registered. How should I recognize it is mobile offer? If I suppose that every hierarchical offers in mobile offer category are mobile offers, I need to check if the offer is mobile. To check it, I need to find mobile offer category traveling categories that include the one mobile offer. I think it is high cost operation. So, what solutions do you offer?

------------------------------
Myagaa Nm
Mobicom Corporation
------------------------------

Hi Myagaa

I suggest that you look for TMF published materials in the area of catalog modeling. This might give you some insights into how to approach your problem.

Specifically in the case you are discussing, it seems to me that you would have a single product specification structure to represent the actual mobile product, irrespective of prepaid or postpaid. This product spec structure is what will be instantiated in the network as mobile service.

You would have different offerings that use prepaid or postpaid behavior. And categories are a great way to organize the different lines of business in your catalog. Not clear to me why you say that this is a high cost.

When customer moves from a prepaid offering to a postpaid offering (for example), the technical aspects of the product (telephone number, voice mail, etc.) will remain unchanged. What will need to change as a result of switching offering would be some indication on the technical product so that the network/OCS will "know" not to ask for quotas at session setup/during session.

Hope it helps

------------------------------
Jonathan Goldberg
Amdocs Management Limited
Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
------------------------------

Hi,

If I wanted to see a list of mobile Product Offers, I could use TMF 620 and filter the list of POs by category name = mobile.

IG1228 has an example under the browse catalogue use case.

There was also a discussion about distinguising post vs pre paid offers a few weeks ago.

------------------------------
Kind regards,

Matthieu Hattab
Lyse Platform
------------------------------

Following  Jonathan's comment about catalog patterns.   Some product modelling works that might be helpful

Product & Service Modelling Best Practices – Conforming to ODA v2.0.0 (IG1233) – TM Forum

Product Catalog Commercial Modeling Patterns v1.0.0 (IG1261) – TM Forum   

Of these I think the pattern 'any of a kind' in IG1261 sec 3.3 might be a starting point but also also look at anti-patterns ins sec 2.5.2 and some advice in sec 2.4.2 on PLM c0nsiderations

------------------------------
Dave Milham
TM Forum, Chief Architect
------------------------------