ServiceNow Telecom products and solutions enable Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to unite the entire service lifecycle on one platform for seamless experiences that help grow revenue, unleash productivity, and reduce costs.
In the Washington D.C. release, we bring several exciting new capabilities to our products Telecom Network Inventory (TNI), Telecom Service Management (TSM), and the newly re-named Sales and Order Management for Telecom (SOMT). TNI introduces features like Rack Visualization and Topology Visualization, digitally transforming network management, and offering future state versions for network connections and inventory planning. TSM excels in diagnostics, introducing enhanced troubleshooting capabilities that provide faster issue resolution and reduce errors. We are excited to showcase SOMT’s new capabilities that manage the entire product sales lifecycle. Integrating systems and teams across the ecosystem accelerates order fulfillment, boosts revenue, and increases overall organizational efficiency, promising a seamless sales and order experience that grows revenue and builds customer loyalty.
Let's deep dive into the key features introduced in each module:
Telecommunications Network Inventory (TNI) Enhancements
TNI introduces several key new features in the Washington D.C. release, including Rack Visualization to digitally view and manage the front and back of equipment racks, Topology Visualization to view representations of complex network topologies, and planned revisions to create future state versions of network connections and inventory.
- Rack Visualization provides a comprehensive view of both the front and back sides of equipment racks, empowering users to plan and utilize their space effectively visually. Additionally, it offers statistics on rack utilization and consumption. The functionality extends to a user-friendly interface, where available equipment can be easily dragged onto the rack, triggering streamlined workflows to ensure tasks are assigned to the right people at the right time.
Rack front and back visualization
- Topology Visualization focuses on enhancing the user interface experience for network engineers working with complex network topologies. Leveraging the Combined Node Map, a successor to the service map and dependency view, allows network engineers to visually render one or more network topologies simultaneously. It provides an interactive canvas, enabling users to click into elements or connections for additional details and drill down into individual configuration items.
Network topology visualization
- Planned revisions help create copies of existing inventory and network configurations for engineers to modify by detailing future design changes. As network engineers work on various network projects (e.g., rehomes, switch cuts, capacity upgrades), planned changes must reflect the future design changes of their current network designs. When a current design changes to its future state version, lifecycle updates for all related CIs will cascade to the new status appropriately. When a future version is promoted to live, the previous version is archived for historical reference.
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Change request for planned revision
Telecommunications Service Management (TSM) Enhancements
In the Washington DC release, Telecom Service Management (TSM) undergoes significant enhancements that support continual modernization for seamless customer experiences.
TSM Service Bridge introduces enhanced troubleshooting capabilities and support for variable sets in remote catalogs. Troubleshooting diagnostics provide insights into the state of the transport system and recent connection-related communications, speeding up issue resolution. Variable sets simplify catalog variables management, enhancing efficiency and reducing errors.
Additionally, TSM introduced automated outbound streaming notification for trouble ticketing via Kafka-based Hermes capability, enhancing case and incident event update times with third-party ticketing applications.
- Enhanced Service Bridge – Transport Diagnostics provides feedback about the state of the transport system and recent communications for each connection, allowing the admin to recognize, test, and recover from errors easily. This feature will enable proactive Service Bridge support and reduce issue resolution time.
Monitoring the connection between ServiceNow instances
- Enhanced Service Bridge - Assigning variables to each catalog item individually is tedious, time-consuming, and susceptible to errors. Remote catalog variable set support enables creating a reusable collection of variables applicable to multiple catalog items. This approach saves time by eliminating redundant variable creation and streamlines updates, as changes in variable sets are automatically reflected across associated items.
Reusable variable sets
- Trouble ticket outbound notifications enable automated streaming (outbound) notification support for trouble ticketing, providing timely updates of cases and incidents to third-party ticketing applications, improving the efficiency of business operations, and reducing delays. Our approach leverages the Hermes capability and utilizes Kafka as the underlying transport mechanism between the two applications. We follow TM Forum's guidelines to maintain compatibility and align with industry standards, particularly TMF621 for trouble tickets and TMF666 for events.
Streaming event notifications
Sales and Order Management for Telecommunications (SOMT) Enhancements
In the Washington D.C. release, Order Management for Telecom (OMT) is re-named to Sales and Order Management for Telecommunications (SOMT) and introduces several exciting new capabilities. SOMT provides a set of applications to manage the product sales lifecycle, including pre-sales opportunities, offer configuration and pricing, sales quote generation, order capture, order fulfillment, and post-sales engagement. It enables organizations to create one continuous value stream by managing the opportunity to renew the lifecycle on one platform. It fuses front, middle, and back office teams with one system of engagement and action. SOMT connects with an organization's existing applications and augments them with ServiceNow workflows, helping increase organizational efficiency, speed up order fulfillment, and accelerate and boost revenue.
- Opportunity Management allows sales agents to track and manage potential opportunities. At the appropriate point, they can seamlessly transition an opportunity to the next phases, like quote creation and generation, order creation, and order fulfillment, all on the unified ServiceNow platform. Opportunities can be imported from third-party systems or created in ServiceNow and pushed to third-party systems. Opportunity Management includes needs analysis, a Kanban view to drag and drop opportunities between stages, opportunity activity tracking, and the ability to easily create quotes from opportunities, helping to improve both efficiency and the customer experience.
Opportunity details
- Quote Management is a new application within SOMT that enables organizations to configure and price quotes, manage the quote lifecycle, and automatically create orders from quotes upon customer acceptance. Quotes can be imported from third-party systems to streamline quote-to-order processes and workflows.
Quote creation using Product Configurator
- Order Capture allows organizations to capture orders faster to increase customer satisfaction and accelerate revenue collection. The order capture experience improved with easier catalog navigation and a new product configurator user interface (UI). It allows minimal order details to be collected upfront and triggers order enrichment tasks to be created and assigned after order capture. Post-sale commercial change order workflows are also available to manage move, add, change, and disconnect orders (MACD), and the same product catalog and configurator are available to provide more upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Order capture with Product Catalog
- Order Fulfillment helps order agents monitor the progress of complex orders with multiple products and fulfillment tasks. Complex orders can take several days to complete and involve different teams. Delays at one step can have cascading effects and put the whole order status at risk. Instead of navigating through multiple related lists and tabs to view the complete order status, now order agents can see everything in one place with a chart highlighting any risks. This helps agents ensure orders are on track, helps identify delays and fallouts, and keeps customers happy by giving them a more accurate order status.
Order timeline view - Customer Contracts & Entitlements enables contract data to be available in a standardized format to support both post-sale workflows and sync with contracts in third-party systems to give agents a consistent view of contracts. Entitlements have been expanded to support several support hours, hourly rates for extra support, SLAs, extended warranty, and more. A standard API is now available to allow customers to automate entitlement verifications. Entitlement offers can be configured in the product catalog and added to orders, products, and services. Using the commercial MACD workflows (see Order Capture and Fulfillment slide), support agents can now easily modify contract entitlements for customers.
Contract workspace
- Product Catalog Management has been enhanced in this release to provide agents with a better configuration and pricing experience, allowing them to configure quotes or orders faster and more accurately. The catalog is available anywhere quotes or orders are accessible during sales or support engagements.
Product Catalog
- Aligned with Industry Standards At ServiceNow, we continue to make industry alignment a key pillar of our Telecommunications product strategy. Our TM Forum Open API conformance certification demonstrates our commitment to our customers; embedding standards into our architecture to further accelerate time to value with certified out-of-the-box integrations. We further expand out-of-the-box integration with partners, to help simplify integration and reduce time to market.
Aligned with industry standards
The Washington D.C. release for Telecom empowers CSPs with a wide range of products and applications to deliver effortless experiences for improved customer satisfaction. To learn more, visit our Telecom page.
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