Open APIs

Greetings,
We have a requirement to associate pricing with service catalogue items but I've noticed that pricing is only catered for within the product catalogue.

So either:

1. I point my service catalogue specifications to a productOfferingPricing out of the productCatalogue or
2. I find some other way to associate a price with a service catalogue entry.

In this model, a customer has bought a product (e.g. MPLS WAN) which has many services (individual sites) and they wish to modify a single service.

Am I correct in thinking that changes against an individual service should be listed in the service catalogue? Our business model currently has that some of these services are chargable but I can't see an obvious way to link a service catalogue item to a pricing record?


------------------------------
Ryan Ruckley
Principal Architect - Digital Transformation
Optus Enterprise & Business
------------------------------

Hi Ryan

I'm afraid that TMF ideology is that we associate prices only with product offerings. Product offerings are what are sold.

And we must be very careful to use the word service accurately. In your example, there is a product (WAN), which has many products (the access points at the sites). So when a customer wants to modify something at a site (e.g. to increase the bandwidth, or to substitute a more capable switch/router), she is modifying a product.
The service represents the underlying implementation of the product in the network. And the service might well be changed due to the modification of the pro

Hope this clarifies things.

------------------------------
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.
------------------------------

Jonathan,
So during decomposition of an order, a product is decomposed into more products?

I'll have to rethink my options here.


------------------------------
Ryan Ruckley
Enterprise Architect
SingTel Optus
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 03:32
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Hi Ryan

I'm afraid that TMF ideology is that we associate prices only with product offerings. Product offerings are what are sold.

And we must be very careful to use the word service accurately. In your example, there is a product (WAN), which has many products (the access points at the sites). So when a customer wants to modify something at a site (e.g. to increase the bandwidth, or to substitute a more capable switch/router), she is modifying a product.
The service represents the underlying implementation of the product in the network. And the service might well be changed due to the modification of the pro

Hope this clarifies things.

------------------------------
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.
------------------------------

I don't think so, Ryan. The site products will be created as part of order capture in the same way as the WAN. Of course it could be that not all the sites are known at the time of the initial order, and you would then have additional orders later on to add more sites to the WAN. And these orders would have prices/charges, e.g. updating the total recurring fee due to new sites, or one-time charges associated with time/materials for installation at site, etc.
The decomposition would be from site product to site service(s).
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.
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 03:38
From: Ryan Ruckley
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Jonathan,
So during decomposition of an order, a product is decomposed into more products?

I'll have to rethink my options here.


------------------------------
Ryan Ruckley
Enterprise Architect
SingTel Optus
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 03:32
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Hi Ryan

I'm afraid that TMF ideology is that we associate prices only with product offerings. Product offerings are what are sold.

And we must be very careful to use the word service accurately. In your example, there is a product (WAN), which has many products (the access points at the sites). So when a customer wants to modify something at a site (e.g. to increase the bandwidth, or to substitute a more capable switch/router), she is modifying a product.
The service represents the underlying implementation of the product in the network. And the service might well be changed due to the modification of the pro

Hope this clarifies things.

------------------------------
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.

Jonathan,
Yes this helps solidify my thinking. I've already updated my design to utilise product catalogue.

When I talk about decomposing, WAN might not be the best example. I think bundling might be the better scenario where a customer buys a cloud service bundled with carriage. We sell the bundle as a product but for fulfilment purposes needs to break that apart into two products that are fulfilled separately. This would result in two product orders with two corresponding service orders being fulfilled via various SOM functions. Does that sound right?

------------------------------
Ryan Ruckley
Enterprise Architect
SingTel Optus
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 07:11
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

I don't think so, Ryan. The site products will be created as part of order capture in the same way as the WAN. Of course it could be that not all the sites are known at the time of the initial order, and you would then have additional orders later on to add more sites to the WAN. And these orders would have prices/charges, e.g. updating the total recurring fee due to new sites, or one-time charges associated with time/materials for installation at site, etc.
The decomposition would be from site product to site service(s).
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.
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 03:38
From: Ryan Ruckley
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Jonathan,
So during decomposition of an order, a product is decomposed into more products?

I'll have to rethink my options here.


------------------------------
Ryan Ruckley
Enterprise Architect
SingTel Optus


Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 03:32
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Hi Ryan

I'm afraid that TMF ideology is that we associate prices only with product offerings. Product offerings are what are sold.

And we must be very careful to use the word service accurately. In your example, there is a product (WAN), which has many products (the access points at the sites). So when a customer wants to modify something at a site (e.g. to increase the bandwidth, or to substitute a more capable switch/router), she is modifying a product.
The service represents the underlying implementation of the product in the network. And the service might well be changed due to the modification of the pro

Hope this clarifies things.

------------------------------
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 Ryan

Basically you have a bundling product offering that contains two simple product offerings (cloud service and carriage). Now it's an implementation decision whether to create a single product order or multiple product orders to instantiate and bundling offering. But if the bundling offering includes pricing information, then almost certainly you would need a single product order, which would include the bundle pricing.
When the product order is submitted, your BSS order handling layer will need to create the relevant service order(s) in call(s) to a SOM. Presumably you would create a service order for each product that has a service (based on the realizing service relationship at catalog). This is the decomposition step.
Hope it makes sense.

------------------------------
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.
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 18:42
From: Ryan Ruckley
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Jonathan,
Yes this helps solidify my thinking. I've already updated my design to utilise product catalogue.

When I talk about decomposing, WAN might not be the best example. I think bundling might be the better scenario where a customer buys a cloud service bundled with carriage. We sell the bundle as a product but for fulfilment purposes needs to break that apart into two products that are fulfilled separately. This would result in two product orders with two corresponding service orders being fulfilled via various SOM functions. Does that sound right?

------------------------------
Ryan Ruckley
Enterprise Architect
SingTel Optus
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 07:11
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

I don't think so, Ryan. The site products will be created as part of order capture in the same way as the WAN. Of course it could be that not all the sites are known at the time of the initial order, and you would then have additional orders later on to add more sites to the WAN. And these orders would have prices/charges, e.g. updating the total recurring fee due to new sites, or one-time charges associated with time/materials for installation at site, etc.
The decomposition would be from site product to site service(s).
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.


Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 03:38
From: Ryan Ruckley
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Jonathan,
So during decomposition of an order, a product is decomposed into more products?

I'll have to rethink my options here.


------------------------------
Ryan Ruckley
Enterprise Architect
SingTel Optus


Original Message:
Sent: Aug 18, 2022 03:32
From: Jonathan Goldberg
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Hi Ryan

I'm afraid that TMF ideology is that we associate prices only with product offerings. Product offerings are what are sold.

And we must be very careful to use the word service accurately. In your example, there is a product (WAN), which has many products (the access points at the sites). So when a customer wants to modify something at a site (e.g. to increase the bandwidth, or to substitute a more capable switch/router), she is modifying a product.
The service represents the underlying implementation of the product in the network. And the service might well be changed due to the modification of the pro

Hope this clarifies things.

------------------------------
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.

Hello,

Maybe this could work:
In TMF620, you have a relationship between the ProductSpecification id and the ServiceSpecification id
since ProductSpecification is associated to ProductOfferings (and the POs are associated to ProductOfferingPrices) you could get all POP for a single ServiceSpecification Id (probably need several API calls to reach the POPs)

However, one would expect to fetch multiple POPs per single ServiceSpecification Id.
example: You create 3 products offerings for a broadband access, all based on the same ProductSpecification and therefore on the same ServiceSpecification.
Due to marketing/commercial requirements, each of these 3 product offerings have 4 prices (depending on the geographic area and the sales channel).
This means your single ServiceSpecification Id is related to  12 POPs.

TMF GB922 guide books have a great guide on Service, (as well as Product and Resource) which are good reads to support their related API.

Hope this helps!

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

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

Matthieu,
That was a good read and I'm now moving onto GB991 which I haven't read for a while to refresh myself.

------------------------------
Ryan Ruckley
Enterprise Architect
SingTel Optus
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Aug 19, 2022 09:24
From: Matthieu Hattab
Subject: Pricing for TMF633

Hello,

Maybe this could work:
In TMF620, you have a relationship between the ProductSpecification id and the ServiceSpecification id
since ProductSpecification is associated to ProductOfferings (and the POs are associated to ProductOfferingPrices) you could get all POP for a single ServiceSpecification Id (probably need several API calls to reach the POPs)

However, one would expect to fetch multiple POPs per single ServiceSpecification Id.
example: You create 3 products offerings for a broadband access, all based on the same ProductSpecification and therefore on the same ServiceSpecification.
Due to marketing/commercial requirements, each of these 3 product offerings have 4 prices (depending on the geographic area and the sales channel).
This means your single ServiceSpecification Id is related to  12 POPs.

TMF GB922 guide books have a great guide on Service, (as well as Product and Resource) which are good reads to support their related API.

Hope this helps!

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

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