PLM is not a recognized discipline within the communications industry as it is in many other industries, despite the fact that the communications industry spends a lot time and effort in delivering and fulfilling a great number of services. In the 90’s, automotive and hi-tech manufacturing were in similar situations, that is they were more focused on product delivery and fulfillment. However, as consumers became the centre of attention with customer-satisfaction significantly driving business strategy, companies were required to shift their emphasis onto product creation and development, the equivalent of the service creation and management portion of NGOSS, improving alongside delivery and fulfillment processes to drive growth and improve profitability. Communications will inevitably follow a similar path.
Creating, deploying and delivering a product is essentially a multi-disciplinary task. In many cases, partners and suppliers, sitting outside of the product company context, are involved in delivering key product parts, such as content, mobile phone devices and phone application software. Collaboration among the organizations and engineers involved is imperative for successful product delivery and end-to-end management of the product lifecycle.
The current PLM process within CSPs is ad-hoc and managed by domain-specific tools, systems (data stores, workflow and spreadsheet) and a combination of processes and paper-based forms. For example, CSPs are currently deploying workflow systems for business process management, document management systems for design storage, EAI and reporting tools for data sharing and a combination of database and paper-based solutions for change management. The exception to this is handset and network element manufacturers, which make a more advanced use of PLM frameworks, similarly to other Hi-Tech industries. However, the overall adoption of PLM automation is still limited and is not treated as an integral part of the CSP value chain. This has resulted in islands of data, disjoint processes and partially automated solutions alleviating some specific issues problems but being unable to deal with challenges in holistic manner.
This technical report introduces a conceptual framework for a Holistic PLM approach in communications. Driven by best practices and experiences of successful PLM application in other industries, briefly reviewed in Section 2, the report goes on to specify in Section 3 a set of meta-capabilities necessary to support end-to-end PLM in a CSP. Subsequently, a brief account is given of current TMF standards relating to PLM and a short gap analysis identifying directions for further improvement in support of a holistic PLM framework. Finally, Section 5 draws some conclusions for the application of the proposed framework in CSPs in the advent of new wave services and platforms such as IMS SCF/SDP.