So far the 21st century has been very tough for service providers. Most of the services that they offer, long distance, Internet access, wireless voice and web-hosting, have become commodities and have left little profit for them. According to a recent report from McKinsey & Co., carriers need to raise revenue or cut costs by at least 25% every year through 2005 to remain profitable. To raise revenue and cut costs, carriers are partnering with other value-added service providers and streamlining their processes with their partners and customers. To many service providers, however, the words “partnering” and “integration” are synonymous to “pain”. Thinking about the contracts and service level agreements, orders and delays, trouble tickets and finger-pointing, settlement and disputes,… with numerous phone calls, faxes and emails. That is, unless there is a comprehensive partner management solution, it is very difficult and expensive to build a value chain of service providers to leverage each other’s service offerings, customer base, and core competencies. They need to integrate and automate their inter-company processes - such as contract and service level agreement (SLA) management, aggregated service management, order and trouble management, usage, invoice and settlement - with their partners and enterprise customers. When the right partner management solution is used, the payback from such partnerships can be huge. The revenue increase depends on the type of services and customer base, and is only limited by the creativeness of the business models; the cost savings on the integration and operation can easily
exceed tens of millions dollars for a tier 1 service provider.

For most service provider value chains, there is one service provider that has a large existing customer base. It aggregates value-added services from its partners and resells the aggregated solutions to its customers, as illustrated in the diagram below. Most of such reselling service providers are large telecommunication carriers (a.k.a. NSP – network service providers such as AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Qwest, SBC, Sprint and Verizon) that have a large consumer/business customer base, a proven customer service platform including customer care and billing, and a solid brand name. The partners that provide the value-added services usually are xSPs (any kind of valueadded service provider); they can also be other network service providers. While multiple service providers may collaborate to offer the aggregated services to the customer at the same time, it is highly desirable to present a single service provider image to the customer. Customers do not want to deal with multiple service providers, for example, reporting problems to
multiple providers and watching them point fingers at each other, and receiving and paying for multiple invoices.

As illustrated in the diagram above, there are two key links in this value chain: one between the customer and the reselling service provider and another between the reselling service provider and its partners. This whitepaper will focus on the link (bold) between the reselling service provider and its partners. It discusses the key requirements of a comprehensive partner management solution for managing the inter-company OSS/BSS (Operations Support Systems and Business Support Systems) processes and the key challenges for deploying such a solution with partners. It will also show how PartnerCommunity addresses these requirements. The link between a service provider and its customers will be discussed in a separate whitepaper.

FORMING AND MANAGING SERVICE PROVIDERS’ ECOSYSTEMS
To successfully form and operate value chains with other service providers, a service provider must be able to 1) establish partnerships with the right partners, 2) manage ongoing operations with its partners efficiently, and 3) make and collect revenue. The functions required to enable these activities boil down to:

To successfully form and operate value chains with other service providers, a service provider must be able to 1) establish partnerships with the right partners, 2) manage ongoing operations with its partners efficiently, and 3) make and collect revenue. The functions required to enable these activities boil down to:

• Directory
• Contract and SLA management
• Collaborative order management
• Collaborative trouble management
• Invoicing, Settlement and Dispute

In the sections below, we will examine the requirements and best practices in
each of these areas.

DIRECTORY
For an ecosystem of service providers to thrive, members must know who else is in the ecosystem and what other members have to offer. A member directory is one of the effective ways to accomplish this. Using an web-based (maybe restricted to an intranet depending how public the information should be made) directory, members can publish their profiles and service descriptions, search for the most appropriate partners based on services and locations, and request information about other members using RFI (Request For Information), RFP (Request For Proposal), and RFQ (Request For Quote).

CONTRACT AND SLA MANAGEMENT
Once a right partner is found, the next step is then to set up a contract and probably a SLA as well. Managing contracts can be a major headache for companies. Not only it is a tedious process, companies can also lose real money if contracts are not enforced properly. There are three general functions in contract/SLA management: contract/SLA negotiation, managing contracts/SLAs, and utilizing information in a contract/SLA. Other definitions of SLA management may also include network monitoring and reporting. While contract negotiation can be a painful process, most companies do not believe it can or want it to be
automated. Every company (even every individual) has its preferred (or religious) way of reviewing, commenting and approving contracts. Getting two companies to agree to use the same contract negotiation tool is often more difficult than negotiating the terms of their business relationship. The two areas that one can add significant value are in managing contracts and making the contract information available to the right people and applications at the right time. Existing contracts should be stored in electronic image format online and indexed for search and retrieval. With the right contract/SLA management tools, salespeople, account managers, business development managers, and senior executives can access the contact information that they need at any time and any place from any Internetenabled device. The contract and SLA terms can also be used by the backoffice applications in real-time; for example, a trouble management application should be able to retrieve the SLA terms on how quickly a particular type of trouble ticket needs to be resolved before incurring a
penalty. Partner managers will be notified automatically prior to the expiration of contracts so that new the partnerships can be reviewed, new terms can be negotiated, and penalties can be avoided.

COLLABORATIVE ORDER MANAGEMENT
Once the contracts and SLAs are set up, and of course after the services have been aggregated and tested, the reselling service provider can start offering the aggregated services to its customers. When a customer orders the aggregated services, the reselling service provider usually needs to ask the wholesale partners to provision the part of services that are aggregated from them. When the customer inquires about the order, the reselling service provider may also have to ask the wholesale partners for the status. Most of these inter-company interactions among service provider partners are carried out manually today through phone calls, faxes and emails. As a result, they are tedious, error-prone and expensive. Some service providers have started to offer web portal interfaces to their partners. While such portal interfaces are effective for consumers and small business customers, they are much less successful with partners. Large business partners have their own internal applications and workflow. From the partner’s point of view, taking the information from their internal applications and then entering it into a service provider’s web page is not much better off than making phone calls, and sending faxes/emails as illustrated in the diagram below:

What partners want is to connect their own workflow with that of the service provider so that orders can flow electronically from the partner’s application to the service provider’s application without human intervention, as shown on page 5 where an order flows through the entire value chain electronically.

In this example, the service provider offers the customer Internet access and document management services. The document management service is aggregated from a partnering service provider. When a customer orders the services, an IT manager at the customer company enters the order into its internal application such as an ERP (enterprise resource planning) application. The order is then, after going through the internal workflow (review and approval), routed electronically to the order management system of the service provider. The service provider provisions the Internet access service and sends a provisioning request to its partner electronically for document management service. The partner will provision the document management service and return the status back to the service provider who will then send a status update to the customer’s internal application. The IT manager at the customer company will find out that the order has been fulfilled from his internal application(s). Such electronic bonding between a service provider and partners eliminates many costly manual procedures. It saves money for all the participants in the value chain.

COLLABORATIVE TROUBLE MANAGEMENT
Once services are ordered and provisioned and the customer starts using them, the customer may experience problems with the services. Regardless who in the value chain caused the problem, the customer usually reports the problem to the reselling service provider. The reselling service provider needs to determine how quickly it must resolve the problem before the SLA terms would be violated and opens an internal trouble ticket to keep track of this problem. If the problem is not internal, it must forward the problem to other partners for their resolution. Again, most of these inter-company processes are carried out manually through phone calls, faxes and emails. Such tedious and error-prone processes and the lack of ability to synchronize the status of such trouble tickets lead to finger-pointing among service providers and dissatisfaction of customers. What the service providers need is a collaborative trouble management solution enabling them to streamline and automate such inter-company processes as illustrated on the following page. Logically, the collaborative trouble management processes are very similar to those of collaborative order management.

Using the same example as in the section above, an end user at the customer site experienced a problem with accessing the document management service. He reports the problem into the customer’s internal helpdesk application. Once it is determined the problem is not caused internally, it is routed to the reselling service provider. The SLA terms between the customer and the service provider are retrieved to determine how quickly this problem must be resolved. The problem report and the SLA terms are then passed to the trouble management system at the service provider. The service provider opens an internal trouble ticket and determines if the problem is related to the Internet access service that it provides. If it is, it will then provide the customer with estimated resolution time and assign technicians to fix the problem. If it is not, it will pass the problem, along with the SLA terms such as how much time is left, to the wholesale provider who provides the document management services. Depending on the SLA terms and how much time the reselling service provider needs to analyze the
problem, the reselling service provider may choose to expedite the process by passing the problem to the wholesale partner earlier to avoid potential SLA violation penalties Similar and more sophisticated business rules can be defined to control these automated inter-company processes.

INVOICING, SETTLEMENT AND DISPUTE
At the end of month, the service provider and its partners need to collect the service fees from the customer and settle the fees among themselves based on their contracts and the customer’s actual usage of the services. Given that the service provider and its partners want to present a single service provider image to the customer, it is important that all the fees are consolidated into one single invoice so that the customer does not receive multiple invoices and make multiple payments. However, the service provider and its partners may not all know what and how much of the services the customer has used. As in the example above, the reselling service provider might not know how much of the document management service provided by its partner the customer has used. Therefore, the service provider and its partners need to share the usage information they collected or the invoices they produced individually so that a single, coherent invoice can be produced for the customer based on the customer’s service contract. Today, most service providers who need to exchange usage and invoice information are doing it either manually (sending tapes and CD-ROMs to each other) or semimanually, using FTP (file transfer) and other similar procedures that can become very difficult to manage when the total number of such files exceeds
a few dozens. Disputes from customers and between partners will further complicate this process and that is why this is one of the most difficult processes for service providers.

The following diagram illustrates how this process works. The service provider aggregates services from partner 1 and partner 2 with its own services. Partner 1 has its own billing system, and is able to rate the usage information and generate an invoice. It routes invoices along with appropriate usage information to the service provider so that a single invoice can be created for the customer. Partner 2 does not have its own billing system. It routes the raw usage data to the service provider. The service provider will rate the usage information from partner 2 and its own usage information. The service provider will generate a final invoice that includes the invoice from partner 1, its own fees, and fees for partner 2 after applying any volume and other types of discounts. The final invoice, along with appropriate usage information, is routed to the customer electronically.

PARTNERCOMMUNITY HAS THE RIGHT SOLUTION
In the past three years, PartnerCommunity has developed a suite of partner management applications to address the requirements discussed above. Using the solution from PartnerCommunity, a service provider can create and manage a private community (one or more value chains) of service providers and business customers easily and cost-effectively. The solution enables the service provider to create a directory for members of the community, to manage contracts and SLAs between the members, to route and manage orders, trouble tickets, usage information and invoices collaboratively with its customers and partners. The solution has been certified and proven by leading telecommunication carriers. For more information about this solution, please contact:

John Yin, PartnerCommunity, Inc.
561-886-1210
jyin@partnercommunity.com.