TMF + Servicenow + Order Management

[Sohithanjan G]

Hey Fishes, 

I have many doubts regarding in relationship between TMF, Servicenow, Order Management. Can you please clear those doubts?

1. What is TMF ? How it is helpful ?

2. How TMF is related to Servicenow OrderManagement ?

[tim_norman]

Hi, TM Forum (TMF) is an alliance of 800+ global companies, including ServiceNow, that is focussed on standards and interoperability between telcos, digital service providers, technology suppliers, consultancies and systems integrators. You can find out more information here; https://www.tmforum.org/about-tm-forum/. To support interoperability between different technologies, the TMF publishes TMF Open APIs and these cover processes such as Alarm Management, Trouble Ticketing and Order Management. ServiceNow's Telecommunications products offer TMF Open APIs and this includes ServiceNow Order Management for Telecommunications. An example is an API based upon the TMF641 Service Ordering Management API specification. You can find more detailed in the online documents, for example; https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-api-reference/page/integrate/guides/telecom/concept/ser...

[Surya247]

TMF (TeleManagement Forum) provides best practices and standards for the telecommunications industry. ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that offers a variety of services, including IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM). Order Management, in this context, typically refers to the process of managing customer orders for telecommunications services.

These three are related in the sense that ServiceNow can be used to implement TMF standards and best practices for Order Management in the telecommunications industry. ServiceNow's flexibility allows it to be customized to support various business processes, including Order Management, based on TMF guidelines. Organizations in the telecommunications sector can leverage ServiceNow to streamline their Order Management processes, ensuring efficient and standardized handling of customer orders.

[ceecee]

Besides from the terminologies, what are the major difference of TMF with the basic APIs of ServiceNow? Are there any functionalities that it has such as auto deduplications or such. 

[Kailash Bhange]

Hi @ceecee 

Good question. Beyond naming, the differences are mostly about contract and behaviour:

1. Standard contract vs table contract
- The Table API exposes one ServiceNow table at a time, with ServiceNow field names. The caller has to know your data model.
- The TMF Open APIs (e.g. Service Order, based on TMF641 v4.1.1, under /api/sn_tmf_api/...) expose the TM Forum resource model: serviceOrder, serviceOrderItem, relatedParty, service characteristics, @type, etc. ServiceNow's implementation is TM Forum conformance-certified, so a BSS/OSS that already speaks TMF can integrate without learning your tables.

2. One call, many records
- A single TMF order POST is fanned out into the order, order line items, characteristic values, line item contacts and related items. With the Table API you'd make each insert yourself and handle the relationships.

3. Business logic built in
- Order lifecycle: states, actions per line (add, change, delete, no-change, suspend, resume) and point of no return (once ponr is true the order can't be changed or cancelled).
- Validation: choice-type characteristic values are checked against the allowed options (invalid ones are logged as work notes on the line item, and you can switch the check off with a flag). Missing or invalid required elements return 400s.
- Async mode to queue large orders.
The Table API just writes rows. All of that would be your own business rules.

4. External references
- externalId links the order to the source system, and related parties, services and product inventory can be referenced by sys_id or external ID. That's how you avoid having to know ServiceNow sys_ids.

5. Deduplication
- TMF itself doesn't give you automatic deduplication. The API handles some cases (e.g. an existing external product inventory ID in a PATCH is ignored rather than erroring), but you should design idempotency around externalId yourself.
- For CIs/inventory, deduplication is the job of the Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE), not the TMF layer.

Note: these APIs come with the telecom order management apps (e.g. the Order Management for Telecommunications plugin and the order_integrator role), so they aren't available on a plain CSM instance.

If this helps, please mark it helpful or accept it as the solution.