Background and use cases for OMT Jeopardy Management
The customer experience when ordering products and services from the telecom service provider begins at pre-sales, then moves to post sales order fulfillment. Timely delivery of ordered products and services, meeting customer committed due dates, are promises that must be kept by the service provider to maintain and enhance the customer relationship.
We are all consumers of telecom service provided product and or service, and we all tend to become disappointed with any provider of service that we are doing business with when they don’t meet our expectations of when we can expect to receive goods purchased and services.
This can create customer retention issues – existing subscribers either quit on you and go to another provider perceived to be more reliable for future business, and or loss of existing business when the contracted period of subscription ends (if a subscription contract exists).
An opportunity can be lost for a new sale and given to a competitor if the service provider is not able to deliver the customer ‘s order on time.
During the pre-sales process, at some point, delivery commitments are made, sometimes, it’s a best effort - we estimate your service will start on such and such date, or there may be a committed due date contract – “you must provide me with this service at this time, I have customer’s waiting that I cannot start billing if you do not met the commitment on this date and time!”.
Or "you must provide the CPE equipment drop shipment on my site at this exact time and date, I will have my technicians onsite or a third-party site installer waiting to install and configure the CPE at this date and time”.
Missing a customer delivery commitment may also incur monetary consequences – customer due date commitments maybe documented in a sales order contract as an SLA (service level agreement) and customer order delivery performance penalties maybe assessed against the service provider when due dates are missed.
OMT jeopardy management will be leveraged as an important tool of the service provider’s customer order fulfillment risk, mitigation and resolution process as it proactively identifies whether a customer order to be fulfilled is trending towards jeopardy.
The telecom service provider has customer order fulfillment experience objectives to meet in order to maintain brand recognition, reduce churn, and maintain customer retention and loyalty.
OMT jeopardy management will be a vital tool to leverage to ensure the customer's order fulfillment experience is a great journey and further enhances the service provider's brand recognition.
Order Fullment jeopardy management data:
The telecom service provider could capture the OMT customer order jeopardy management data as inputs into an order fulfillment completion report (developed by the SP) that helps to identify gaps in the order fulfillment delivery process that are contributing factors to fulling orders on time. Note: the feature does not generate customer order jeopardy reports.
At runtime, OMT captured jeopardy management datasets that can be mined for post processing reports:
- Customer order – order Task SLA breaches per for a product, service, resource specification within the order to be fulfilled.
- Number of Order entity Planned start/end date shifts information are rolled up– the shift in planned end dates as compared and benchmarked against the estimated start and end dates has occurred during the order’s fulfillment lifecycle.
- Jeopardy level roll up events:
- Number of customer order jeopardy level lifecycle transitions (jeopardy level assessment updates)
- Number of Domain order jeopardy level lifecycle transitions (jeopardy level assessment updates)
- (jeopardy level assessment updates)
- Number of Order task jeopardy level lifecycle transitions (jeopardy level assessment updates)
- Percentage of time a customer order entity spends in a particular jeopardy level
- What order tasks (request types) frequently are in a high or critical jeopardy level
- What OLI specifications are frequently in a high or critical jeopardy level
The above OMT jeopardy management dataset is an example of the type of OMT jeopardy management information can be purposed for jeopardy related impacts to the product, or service being fulfilled.
Examples of jeopardy management analytics use cases:
Product Manager use case:
As a PM responsible for a products performance, one of her concerns is whether the product offering’s fulfillment plan is implemented and executed as designed. “How do I ensure that my customer experience is a satisfactory one, from the point of order to the point of use?” She will probably as part of her analysis look at jeopardy management reports that she has requested IT to develop based on customer product and service orders fulfilled:
- Are her products being fulfilled with no SLA breaches, and or higher than medium level of jeopardy
- What percentage of orders for her products go into jeopardy while being fulfilled?
- What percentage of customer orders for the product offerings launched are not meeting fulfillment delivery commitments as indicated by OMT customer committed due date jeopardy assessment?
- What percentage and what type of OLI specifications for the offerings launched and being fulfilled in OMT not meeting fulfillment delivery commitments as indicated by customer committed due date jeopardy assessments
The product manager may use OMT captured jeopardy management datasets as input to generate reports as Jeopardy management analytics is not a feature of jeopardy management,
Note: we are describing the datasets as input for customized reporting and analytics– the data outputs to understand and identify products that are not meeting the customer’s experience with the product.
The product manager can leverage the outputs to work with other stakeholders – flow designers, process analyst and fulfillment managers to see what strategies can be employed to reduce order fulfillment delivery risks.
Fulfillment managers have an interest in product and service order fulfillment assurance and will leverage OMT jeopardy management captured data to capture to understand how well his/her department is performing in meeting order fulfillment timely completion metrics.
Fulfillment Manager and agent use case:
As a fulfillment manager, I need to know whether we are meeting our departments performance objective to complete order fulfillment of customer orders in the 90-percentile range. Therefore, I need to have IT create jeopardy management reports that can identify the number and percentage of orders of certain types have been at risk and mitigated or have been at risk and missed committed or expected order completion dates per product, service or resource specification as identified by the order line item.
As a fulfillment manager I need OMT jeopardy management dataset as input to fulfillment assurance reports to help me in ensuring my agents meet their key performance indicators. I can use this data to identify training needs, and skillset levels and further, I can then come up with strategies and polices on what type of orders, and order priorities need to be assigned to different agent skill levels.
As a fulfillment agent I need jeopardy management dataset input ti generate reports that can help me identify what training curriculum I may want to apply to upgrade my skillsets in managing order fulfillment for different customer orders by product and specification and fulfillment plan. I can also use jeopardy management data to assess my level of performance in meeting my performance objectives.
Fulfillment (flow designers) and business process analyst use case:
As a flow designer and or business process developer I need jeopardy management reports to be processed and generated that helps me in understanding and identifying if there is a correlation between jeopardy risk levels and my sub flows designs for a specification? I can use this type of data to help me identify any potential optimization I may need to do for my fulfillment plans. If we find a correlation.
Jeopardy Management and Telecommunications Management Forum (TMF)
TM Forum is a global industry association for service providers and their suppliers in the telecommunications industry. Members include communications and digital service providers, telephone companies, cable operators, network operators, cloud providers, digital infrastructure providers, software suppliers, equipment suppliers, systems integrators, and management consultancies. Service providers use the TM FORUM Open Digital Architecture (ODA) reference architecture standards for guidance in developing their individual digital transformation journeys with applied, and collaboratively developed assets.
As part of the service provider's journey to digital transformation, service providers reference the TMF ODA's enhanced telecommunications operations management (eTOM) business processes framework.
The eTOM Business Process Framework is an operating model framework for telecom service providers in the telecommunications industry. The model describes the required business processes of service providers and defines key elements and how they should interact.
Service providers when developing RFIs and RFPs for selecting order management product vendors will usually refer to the ODA model when developing and implementing a more digital maturity model-based business operating model.
TMF eTOM map:
OMT’s jeopardy management aligns and supports directly or partially the following ODA eTOM process areas:
- Track & Manage Service Provisioning - monitoring the jeopardy status of service orders, and escalating service orders as necessary.
- Undertake Order Management Trend Analysis - undertake trend analysis on order Management, such as time taken to complete a customer order, frequency and type of Order Management process issues involved, and canceled orders.
- Customer Order Processing Management - Customer Order Processing Management business process directs and controls all activities that operationally realize orders for customer.
OMT jeopardy management supports directly or partially the following ODA eTOM process areas:
- Market Sales Readiness & Support - Market Sales Support & Readiness processes ensure the support capability is in place to allow the CRM Fulfillment, Assurance and Billing processes to operate effectively.
- Customer Readiness & Support - Customer Support processes ensure the support capability is in place to allow the CRM Fulfillment, Assurance and Billing processes to operate effectively.
- Manage Product Order Fulfillment - manage Product Order Delivery business activity directs and controls the activities to validate products in the product order. Manage Product Order Delivery business activity ensures product can successfully be supplied to consignee of the product order to enable complete the product order process.
- Ensure Retention & Loyalty Capability
I've included the following process domain simply because OMT jeopardy management is a capability that as mentioned in the background section helps in keeping customers and potential customer happy due to it’s order fulfillment proactive risk mitigation.
- Build Customer Insight - ensure that Service Provider and the customer feel confident that the relationship is founded on up-to-date, accurate and legally and or contract compliant information.
- Identify Risk Management Treatment - identifies treatments to manage these risks and focuses on using customer information. The purpose is to track and improve Operations, target and win the right customers and improves Sales Conversion rate.
High Level Overview of run time OMT Jeopardy Management logic
OMT jeopardy management monitoring process involves these main activities:
- Monitoring customer order fulfillment task progression (elapse time)
- Assessing whether an order task exceeds a user configured Task SLA percentage of task progression duration.
- Assessing and assigning a risk level for order entities that comprise the customer order (order, domain and task levels) – bottom level to top level of order hierarchy.
- Planned date rollup when fulfillment execution plan shifts due to task completion delays – this happens from bottom to top - order task to domain order to order line item.
Runtime logic flow:
- Order captured and decomposed: task create with relationships.
- Calculate order fulfillment execution plan - plan start /end dates, rollup dates from bottom order entity to top order entity, benchmark rollup dates.
- Monitor order entities for SLA progression delay threshold crossings/update plan and rollup dates
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- View & assess order entities jeopardy data in UI, notify stakeholders, resolve
Run time Feature description list:
- Predictive order fulfillment jeopardy monitoring –
- Order task progression is monitored against task SLAs definitions.
- SLA Threshold crossing event triggers- if an order line item or an order task duration to complete exceeds a configured SLA task % trigger threshold, OMT will look up the jeopardy policy rules to assess level of jeopardy, update the jeopardy level from task through to order and capture updates in UI.
Order Task Jeopardy Level Calculation Policy decision table:
Percentage Calculation example for order task:
Percentage calculation example for order line item:
Plan roll up logic - as order tasks are completed as task planned dates, OMT will roll-up planned dates (start date and end date) from bottom to top – order task start/end dates, domain order start and end dates, order line item start and end dates. Planned Start and end date rollup – logic calculates all dates based on relationships between all task to baseline initial snapshot of dates, which will be used for future comparison of dates as tasks are completed.
Upon a task state change from "in progress" to "closed complete or "cancel", OMT will execute jeopardy workflow roll up logic to update planned dates for all order entities.
OMT Calculates and rolls up planned dates based on date baseline - start date and end planned time for each order object entity from bottom to top order entity hierarchy.
- Order Task
- Domain Order
- Order Line Item
- Order
As order tasks are completed, task planned dates shift and the dates are rolled-up.
Rollup logic examples:
Rollup logic example - plan date updates:
Calculate & Baseline dates – planned dates and estimated dates are the same initially. Then can be recalculated for inflight and staggered decomposition.
Order Line UI form - other details:
Shift planned dates – task states cycled to “closed complete” – took 12 minutes, shifted benchmarked planned end date by 12 mins timestamp was 2023-07-05 04:57, updated to 2023-07-05 05:19
Date rollup occurs – rolled up planned end dates from order task to domain order to Order line 12 minutes later.
Order Line UI form - other details:
Jeopardy level roll up logic - when jeopardy calculation logic is triggered, it first determines if an entity is in jeopardy or not, before assigning a jeopardy level value and updates the record. For order tasks, this entire process is triggered as specified in SLA Processing flow.
For domain order, order line item, and order, check for jeopardy happens when an order task goes into jeopardy, which triggers a cascade check through configured jeopardy order line and order task jeopardy level business rules.
If order task jeopardy level changes or order task is closed, jeopardy level roll up logic will trigger and will update domain order, order line item, order jeopardy level if applicable.
What to know about jeopardy level rollup:
An order will inherit the highest level of jeopardy from the top order line item.
Order UI form - jeopardy level:
Oder line-item UI form - jeopardy level
A domain order will inherit the highest level of jeopardy from an order task.
Domain order UI form - jeopardy level
Order task UI form - jeopardy level
Committed Due Date jeopardy determination - For order line item and order, if a committed due date is provided, an extra layer of jeopardy level determination and calculation logic will be triggered upon order approval. This capability is for when an order has a contracted agreement to complete an order or an order line item (domain order by a specified date/time commitment.
It was recognized that the service provider would need to know as soon as an order is approved, if a jeopardy condition is present for an order that has a committed due date, OMT jeopardy management will compare the benchmarked planned date/estimated dates calculated to the CDD dates and indicate whether the order is “starting” at a level of jeopardy, a risk is present as soon as the order has been created and approved! This gives an immediate opportunity for the fulfillment manager to increase the order priority level, or some other risk mitigation process.
Rule: An order line item is in jeopardy if the calculated end date ( i.e planned end date) is later than expected end date or Customer commitment date (if available)
Rule: a customer order is in jeopardy if the calculated end date ( i.e planned end date) for the order is later than expected end date or Customer commitment date (if available)
Jeopardy information sharing – capture of jeopardy related data in order, order line, domain order and order task UI forms, and orchestration UI for easy observation of actionable jeopardy related data.
As a fulfillment manager/agent assigned to several order tasks – I want to be able to view all tasks in of an order line item for current jeopardy levels.
Order line-item UI form:
As a fulfillment agent or manager, I expect automatic re-assessment of all related order entity jeopardy levels when a task state is updated which impacts current jeopardy level.
Order line item UI form:
As a fulfillment agent or manager, I expect automatic re-assessment of all related order entity jeopardy levels when a task state is updated that impacts current jeopardy level:
Inflight, staggered decomposition, multiple quantity orders - supported by jeopardy logic and jeopardy runtime workflow.
- As an OMT system, order line items that have been fully decomposed will have Jeopardy workflow started and SLA monitoring.
- As a fulfillment manager or agent, I expect if order staggered decomposition occurs, each occurrence of staggered OLI decomposition will cause jeopardy workflow logic to restart.
As a fulfillment manager or agent when inflight revision occurs that all order tasks o to hold state, jeopardy monitoring stops; when inflight is approved, jeopardy workflow and logic restarted as if it’s a new order and any added tasks are in scheduled state:
Jeopardy management enablement - jeopardy management for a specification (order line item), turn on jeopardy management or turn it off based on business policy. A service provider when using jeopardy management feature in Vancouver must decide what existing product offerings will be subject to jeopardy.
Jeopardy Management Enablement Policy decision table:
UI capture of new jeopardy related date fields: planned and estimated dates:
We will deep dive into the new OOOB jeopardy workflow actions available in next article.
Existing service provider OMT flows before Vancouver release will not automatically be enabled to apply the jeopardy management workflow logic. Pre- Vancouver customer's created fulfillment flows if enabled for jeopardy management will not be able to properly utilize the jeopardy feature correctly and the logic will not run properly without the new jeopardy workflow OOB jeopardy flow tasks created as part of the existing specification fulfillment flows. New customer flows when created will need to be configured with the five jeopardy management flow actions.
With the introduction of jeopardy features, CSM order task now extends from planned task, which extends from base task, making OMT order task extending from planned task. Order task will receive date fields and date fields’ roll up logic that come with planned task. Order task will now be able to take advantage of planned task relationship, which establishes relationship between two planned task records.
Much more on these topics in the next deep dive article:
- Configuring existing and new fulfillment sub flows with new jeopardy flow actions
- Configuring SLA Task Duration
- Configuring Jeopardy management decision tables
- Jeopardy Management design time flow sequence of steps - end to end
- Recorded runtime demo.
References:
Jeopardy Management (servicenow.com)
https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB1496935
