Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is no longer a fragmented discipline, but a necessity for any company seeking consistent end-to-end management of complex value chains.

Based on the market situation today, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) have to differentiate themselves via their ability to offer a wide variety of products that can be tailored to meet the needs of the individual customer. It is no longer enough to simply own the network – the key to reducing customer churn and indeed, attracting new customers is becoming a product-driven organization. Consequently, CSPs are shifting their primary focus from product delivery and fulfillment to the all-important “Customer Experience,” it is PLM that becomes the means through which customer loyalty and churn are greatly influenced.

Whilst PLM is an integral discipline of other industries (e.g. auto-manufacturers), it is a new concept for CSPs to embrace. Simply deploying a PLM software application is not the ‘silver bullet’ – building PLM processes around the software application itself, associated B/OSS and the relevant CSP personnel will ultimately see the CSP emerge as a true PLM driven organization.

The purpose of this report is to provide a set of guidelines for PLM practices, from which a CSP can leverage to meet their particular needs / requirements. The specification introduces a series of lifecycle phases around which product related entities (Product, Service, Resource) evolve from inception through to retirement. Within each phase, a typical set of actors / roles are identified and a corresponding set of activities which can optionally result in the transition from one phase to another.


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