Trouble administration between service providers is a nightmare. Finger-pointing between carriers over service problems has been well publicized in the press. Irate customers harmed by inadequate systems and processes have demanded compensation, rebates, and free service for a company's inability to clear trouble within the terms of its service level agreement (SLA) commitments.

Face it. The majority of today's service providers use a manual approach for managing inter-company trouble reports. Other service providers are attempting to integrate with their partners' internal trouble administration systems through point-to-point connections. But neither of these approaches provides the speed and flexibility that is necessary for effective trouble resolution in a multi-partner value chain.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

PartnerCommunity's Collaborative Trouble management provides and effective, automated system for the exchange of trouble report information. But even more importantly, it provides powerful processes that manage the progress of multi-company trouble reports from creation and modification through resolution, closure and archival.

The Information You Need - When You Need It
Effectively managing trouble is all about having the right information at the right time. Not after you've rolled a truck. Or missed your SLA commitment. Or lost a customer to a competitor.

Most service providers have solid internal trouble administration systems and processes. Problems arise when the trouble report goes outside of the control of a single company. Collaborative Trouble management complements internal trouble administration by enabling service providers to exchange-and act upon- the right information at the right time.

Collaborative Trouble Management gives you and your partners the ability to do the following:

• Exchange prompt and relevant notices about problems that affect service quality or require remedial action
• Selectively share filtered customer profile data with your trading partners to facilitate trouble resolution
• Exchange information on the progress of trouble resolution
• Coordinate trouble resolution activity between partners and confirm clearance
• Track the quality of trouble resolution against SLA commitments, and analyze historical records of trouble reports, either for operational improvement or contractual purposes

Flexible Support for All Trouble Ticket Methods
Collaborative Trouble Management provides a comprehensive gateway for trouble ticket transactions. This gateway performs data and protocol translation, enabling you to convert any format used by your customer and trading partners to your won and back again.

Collaborative Trouble Management provides two interfaces for creating, receiving and processing transaction:

• Interactive Access: Trouble tickets, response and resolution notices can be created, received and managed interactively, allowing you to process transaction with causal or low-volume partners without setting them up through an integration server.
• Process Integration: Process integration provides full, seamless integration between your trouble management system and those of your customer and trading partners.

Service providers who want the greatest degrees of integration, automation and streamlining typically choose process integration. With this approach, your employees remain within your own trouble management environment. Incoming or outgoing transactions are processed quickly and securely, and show up as though they were entered natively on your own system.

A Comprehensive, State-of-the-Art Feature Set
Collaborative Trouble Management, like all of PartnerCommunity's partner management products, is built on robust, reliable and secure B2B technologies. Its comprehensive feature set includes the following:

• A Gateway for enhancing trouble tickets between service providers and their customer and partners
• Business processes for the following: delegation with feedback, delegation without feedback, provider-originated tickets, splitting tickets between multiple service providers, and updating or canceling open trouble tickets
• Web-based trouble ticket status tracking, trouble ticket history and trouble ticket template definition
• User-controllable workflow steps
• Trouble ticket validation based on the terms of associated contracts and SLAs
• Creation and distribution of trouble ticket validation rules

The portal functionality in Collaborative Trouble Management can cover most requirements out of the box. Depending on your business requirements, you can use the interactive access method for immediate business results.

Integration with your existing trouble administration system, as well as those of your customers and trading partners is done thought and implementation project. Our adapter development environment provides flexible technologies for rapid integration with existing business systems and processes. In addition, PartnerCommunity can provide pre-configured electronic-bonding appliances to your customers and trading partners that are packaged for fast, low -cost integration with your system.

PartnerCommunity provides management and integration services through its Professional Service organization for the successful implementation and operation of your Collaborative Trouble Management software. With PartnerCommunity's Professional Services, you can integrate your business processes and systems with those of your partners in weeks, not months.

Keep your options open with a standards-based architecture
Collaborative Trouble Management is built upon PartnerCommunity's state-of-the-art business-to-business platform, providing native support for XML and other leading technologies. It has also been designed to support industry standards, including the following:

• T1.227 & T1.228 - ANSI's Telecommunications Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning (OAM&P) Extension to the Generic network Information model for interfaces between Operations Systems across Jurisdictional Boundaries to Support Fault Management (Trouble Administration)
• Common Interface Model (CIM) Schema - The Distributed Management Task Force's common data model of an implementation-neutral schema for describing overall management information in a network/enterprise environment
• JavaOSS - Java specification for providing interfaces for creating, querying, updating and deleting transactions
• NMF 501 & 504 - Network Management Forum's Customer to Service Provider Trouble Administration Business Agreement, and Smart Ordering Service Provider to Service Provider Interface Business Agreement
• TMF 053 - Telemanagement Forum's Next-Generation OSS (NGOSS) Architecture Technology Neutral Specification

Collaborative Trouble Management integrates with your current systems and processes to give you the information you need, when you need it. It extends your trouble administration capabilities to seamlessly integrate with your customer sand trading partners, elimination costly, slow, error-filled manual processes. Through the power of public and private business process integration, you can manage trouble in ways that will delight your customer and your investor alike.

So contact PartnerCommunity about Collaborative Trouble Management. Because it's time you got out of trouble.