What if you lost millions in equity because you never tracked your network assets? Is there a stale inventory list siphoning money from your business? A good telecom inventory management platform will help mitigate these gaps. In fact, telecom carriers lose up to 9% of annual revenue to revenue leakages, caused by siloed processes and manual mistakes. Today’s inventory systems connect operational networks and billing systems to capture and charge for all services.
Why Inventory Management is Critical to Telecom Profits
A data center with fiber optic cables, depicting the operations of a powerful telecom inventory management platform. Modern inventory management platforms provide a single source of truth for all assets: fiber lines, routers, and virtual services. By automatically gathering data and performing live reconciliation, they remove the errors associated with manual processes. By instilling disciplined inventory processes, companies can prevent overpaying for unused services and obviate hidden charges. A single platform is the bedrock of accurate service mapping, billing, and capacity planning.
Why Inventory Visibility Stops Revenue Leaks
Inventory isn’t just record-keeping in telecom. It’s central to billing accuracy and cost control. An effective telecom inventory management platform ties each service to its underlying asset, preventing anything that is not billed before it is delivered. By ensuring services are asset-assigned, revenue leakage is prevented by eliminating unwatched usage. And, when inventory is lacking, operators become prone to inefficiencies, sluggish provisioning, and wasted spend. For example, duplicate asset purchases pad CAPEX, while missing data slows service activation and disappoints customers.
Legacy inventory methodologies confront many typical challenges, including the following:
Disparate documentation:
Multiple data elements are stored across many different types of spreadsheets and systems that do not share a single authoritative source of truth.
Old Equipment Record Data
Network modifications are not recorded in the inventory, thereby leaving behind ‘ghosts’ and “orphaned” devices.
Lack of Service Association
Not having insight into and being unable to associate which network devices support customer services.
As a consequence, revenue leaks due to under-utilization and excess spending come about from these gaps in information. According to various industry sources, as much as 30% of telecom assets are not utilized or duplicate assets because of fragmented inventory systems. Conversely, a telecom inventory management platform for a contemporary telecom network gives users access to their inventory in real-time and offers an automated process that prevents these types of losses.
Key Features of an Effective Telecom Inventory Management Platform
A telecom inventory management platform typically includes the following advanced features:
1. End-to-End Inventory Management:
Enables end users or telecoms to have a single view of physical inventory (e.g., cables, circuits), logical inventory (e.g., routers, switches), and services (e.g., customers). Thus, users can effectively track their entire inventory at any time by properly associating the layers of their inventory together and mapping them to the customer’s new service or order.
2. Live Reconciliation:
The inventory data that users see will always be in sync with the actual live state of the network. Automated reconciliation engines will reconcile the live network feed against the inventory data in the backend system. This will allow users to identify and resolve discrepancies in their inventory data before they create billing or service errors.
3. OSS/BSS Integration:
Provides complete integration with the provisioning, order entry, and billing systems. Orders placed via the telecom inventory management platforms will automatically update inventory, and every service currently active in the network will have an associated asset. It is linked back to the asset, allowing carriers to identify which assets should be billed directly to their customers.
4. GIS Mapping and Planning:
Provides built-in GIS mapping and geographic-based planning capabilities. Fiber routes, tower locations, site locations, and other elements of deployment are easily identified on maps to help with site selection and to minimize duplicate work.
5. Intelligent Analytics and Alerts:
Provides dashboards and reports of KPIs such as Asset Utilization, Service Turnaround Times, and Leakage Risk. The intelligent alerting mechanisms identify anomalies like Orphan Services and Inventory Thresholds to allow teams to proactively resolve issues before they impact potential revenues.
To summarize, telecom network inventory management solutions need to address a number of different aspects resulting from the complexity of your business environment due to multiple vendors’ equipment and hybrid clouds, and on-prem components, along with different types of services. A telecom inventory management platform should address fibre, wireless, and virtual inventory items.
6D’s telecom inventory management platform was developed to accommodate networks with equipment from multiple manufacturers and can connect to existing ERP and/or CRM systems, providing a centralised point for accessing accurate information for all departments within your organisation.
The Integration of Inventory Control with Sales and Distribution Platforms
An increasing number of businesses now manage inventory using new sales and distribution platforms. The leading CSPs take advantage of the way they develop these systems, using AI, to create an integrated solution that combines functions such as dealer management, POS systems, and telecom inventory management platforms into one system.
When Evaluating Telecom Inventory Solutions, Pay Attention to These Criteria.
A telecom inventory management platform should have the ability to receive data from existing systems with as compact manual data entry as possible (OSS / BSS / ERP / CRM) and feed real-time updates from Integrations and APIs into your inventory management in telecom platform.
The right telecom network inventory management solution will scale to support your growing service catalogue or to support an expanding network footprint. It can be hosted in your data Centre or in the cloud.
The inventory management for telecom should support your service type and your workflow. Configurable / Modular systems can be designed to meet your telco processes.
Data accuracy controls in inventory management for telecom should include features such as live reconciliation engines and golden record governance to ensure your data remains accurate.
Usability in sales and distribution platforms means that an intuitive user interface and mobile access will increase adoption rates. Field engineers should be able to scan an asset to determine whether it is available or check stock levels.
Ensuring your telecom network inventory management solution stops leaks requires adopting the best practices outlined above.
Conclusion
To reduce revenue leakage, all telecom services must implement sales and distribution platforms. The inventory management tool provides the necessary controls and visibility to identify areas of hidden leakage, including unaccounted usage and redundant inventory. Combining inventory management for telecom functionality with sales and distribution platform features provides additional insight across all channels. It allows service providers to recover all revenue earned and leverage their inventory as a strategic asset rather than a liability. To learn more contact us now.
