Business support system


Business support systems are the components that a telecommunications service provider uses to run its business operations towards customers.
Together with operations support systems, they are used to support various end-to-end telecommunication services. BSS and OSS have their own data and service responsibilities. The two systems together are abbreviated in various ways, such as OSS/BSS, BSS/OSS, B/OSS, BSSOSS, OSSBSS or BOSS. Some commentators and analysts take a network-up approach to these systems and others take a business-down approach.
The initialism BSS is also used in a singular form to refer to all the business support systems viewed as a whole system.

Role

BSS deals with the taking of orders, payment issues, revenues, etc. It supports four processes: product management, order management, revenue management and customer management.

Product management

Product management supports product development, the sales and management of products, offers and bundles to businesses and mass-market customers. Product management regularly includes offering cross-product discounts, appropriate pricing and managing how products relate to one another.

Customer management

Service providers require a single view of the customer and regularly need to support complex hierarchies across customer-facing applications. Customer management also covers requirements for partner management and 24x7 web-based customer self-service. Customer management can also be thought of as full-fledged customer relationship management systems implemented to help customer care agents handle the customers in a better and more informed manner.

Revenue management

Revenue management focuses on billing, charging and settlement. It includes billing for consumer, enterprise and wholesale services, including interconnect and roaming. This includes billing mediation systems, bill generation and bill presentment. Revenue management may also include fraud management and revenue assurance.

Order management

Order management encompasses four areas:
Order management as a beginning of assurance is normally associated with OSS, although BSS is often the business driver for fulfillment management and order provisioning.