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The BBE product family provides external interfaces for the underlying network management systems

BBE Overview

The Broadband Business Engine (BBE) is a purpose-built set of administration applications providing an efficient management of day-to-day customer operations. It provides functions like customer management, product lifecycle management, troubleshooting, ticketing, customer self-service portal, statistics and billing reports.

BBE has been in commercial use for more than 15 years and is used by operators with various business models, including open access. BBE is fully integrated with PacketFront Software’s BECS network management system for automated end-to-end service activation from order to network element configuration, providing maximum efficiency and performance.

Network marketing

Regardless if you are using an Open Access or Vertical business model, marketing of your network and services is essential. However, to make this happen with reasonable effort and cost is hard without automation.

BBE provides a number of tools and features to improve sign-up rates. With BBE’s built-in reporting capabilities it is easy to pin-point areas with low service take rates and find “untapped” revenue streams. Provided with this information, you can make targeted campaigns and receive the best possible outcome for your marketing activities.

BBE has a full set of campaign tools enabling efficient service marketing for the entire network, selected geographical areas or particular user groups. This can be combined with a self-service portal ensuring maximum visibility.

The automated order and service activation process via self-service portal makes the buy decision easy for end-customers, further increasing the service take rates.

Service delivery

BBE’s Customer and Product life cycle modules offer flexible and versatile management of customers and services creating, together with the other BBE modules, a fully fledged and integrated solution for handling service desk workflows.

Just to give a couple of examples:

  • The service desk can activate, deactivate and pause services. As the service activation/deactivation is automated end-to-end, the customer data, such as billing records, are always up to date and synchronized with the network configuration.
  • In case a customer calls to the service desk due to a service delivery problem, the personnel will have immediate commercial and technical information about the services and can trouble shoot directly via BBE helpdesk tool. If there is an identified problem, a trouble ticket can be created directly in BBE.

Open and standards compliant

BBE is based on the Telecom Management Forum (TMF) NGOSS standard data model, SID.

The BBE product family provides external interfaces for the underlying network management systems, databases and other OSS/BSS platforms in the form of an open SOAP XML API. BBE business applications publish functions as high-level API calls for easy integration. For example: The intelligent helpdesk function collects technical customer data from all elements on the service delivery path and presents it as a single API call.

PacketFront Software: True Open Access pioneers

As the Open Access networks started to emerge at the beginning of the 21st century in the Nordic countries, PacketFront Software was the first supplier providing tailored solutions for these networks. Today our products are used by more than 50 Open Access networks throughout the world. Read more about Open Access here.

Subscriber Management

Customer database. Associate network ports with customer addresses.

BBE provides and maintains a database containing customer data and includes information like network ports and customers’ delivery addresses. Other examples of the customer data are: end-users’ names, addresses, billing IDs, network usernames and service subscriptions, as well as clients’ MAC addresses.

BBE enables creating, searching, editing, or deleting an end user in the system as well as adding or removing subscriptions to product offerings.

Tasks easily carried out in BBE include:

  • Moving end-users to another address in the network (schedule supported)
  • Suspending or reinstating end-users (schedule supported)

BBE enables smooth import and export of end-user data from/to other customer management systems, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

Product Management

Package services into commercial products including binding times, campaigns, availability periods, geographical availability etc.

BBE can be used for management of any type of services, including services requiring network reconfiguration (e.g. Internet or VPN) and non-network-related services (e.g. ordering a new IPTV set top box to a customer).

A group of services can be packaged into one product. The product is complemented with terms and conditions, and is offered to end-users as a product offering.

BBE allows service providers to define customer groups to which the products offering will be made available. Target groups can for example consist of customers in a specific geographical area or employees of a certain company.

Product life cycle management

BBE keeps track of the product offering life cycle. The service provider can manage the life cycle using conditions such as start of sales, start of delivery, end of sales, end of delivery, and notification periods.

These conditions allow service providers to handle the product offering life cycle efficiently and to offer time-limited products while maintaining control. The system also ensures that customers cannot order conflicting products or terminate / downgrade products while under contract.

Product activation

A product can be activated from a CRM system via an open API interface, through the Self Selection Portal or directly in the BBE GUI. In many cases, like in Internet or VPN service provisioning, the activation process is immediate allowing fast and automated service delivery process. In other cases some manual actions, such as patching or HW delivery, may be needed prior to service activation. In such cases the BBE’s integrated workflow engine can be used to handle the process flow.

Intelligent Helpdesk

Collects all trouble shooting data for a customer or a service and displays it in a unified manner.

With the help of BBE the helpdesk personnel can handle a considerably larger part of the first line technical support directly instead of forwarding cases to network engineers.

Visibility of Key Network Information

BBE requests troubleshooting information from BECS and shows this information either on the BBE Web GUI or publishes it via API to other systems. The presented information is intuitive and for example provides a view of the network topology.

This view shows to which port of the CPE the customer equipment is connected and how the CPE or CE is connected to the core network. BBE provides troubleshooting information for all network elements and ports on this path.

The BBE can even show VPN connections and relevant data for trouble shooting the VPN link.

BBE provides also other valuable information, such as the current and historical lease/expire information for each service.

Access Control on Troubleshooting Data

In a wholesale or open access network all troubleshooting data in the complete network is visible to the network owner. However, each service provider can troubleshoot its own services and cannot see the any information or data of other customers or service providers.

Verify and Repair

BBE provides a verification function that checks whether the subscription on a specific port is correctly provisioned. If the service provisioning is incorrect, the user can use the Repair function to correct the subscription by recreating the element configuration.

Trouble Ticketing

BBE has an integrated light-weight trouble ticketing application that is suitable for smaller operators. The ticketing application supports both internal and external tickets including handover and escalation processes, time reporting per ticket, flexible category management and provides detailed ticket statistics and reports.

Solutions for orchestrating complex networks

Service Portal

Rest API and a reference portal providing web-shop and self-service functions.

BBE is an interface to offer end customers the possibility to self-provision the services of their choice. Selections made by the customer are logged to a history file in BBE and the service is automatically provisioned to the customer.

Using BBE, service activation/deactivation is fully automated and this makes it possible to offer completely new types of on-demand and time based services that have not been previously profitable.

Attractive Interface for Service Exposure Reduces Workload for Customer Support

BBE provides an attractive market place, i.e. a shop window with a state-of-the-art feel, for service exposure, promotion campaigns and marketing.

BBE provides residential and business customers a possibility to select, activate, deactivate or change their service subscription in real time. Simple wizards guide the customer through the steps. The service is then automatically provisioned via the network to the end users client (CPE/CE, Set Top Box, PC, phone etc.) and is ready for immediate use.

Increase Service Uptake and Consumption

Due to the simplicity with which end users can select and activate service subscriptions with SSP, service usage increases. It is also easier for service providers to allow end users to try new services because no interaction is required by customer service centers. This also reduces the workload for the service center personnel.

Reference Portal

The delivery of the BBE includes a WordPress based reference portal. This allows operators to implement the portal fast and cost efficient.

The BBE open API interface enables, however, integration with any portal implementation. This provides the network owners the full flexibility to use tools and WEB design partners of their choice.

Report Generator

Compile and create reports utilizing all data in the system, including billing data, service penetration etc.

The Report Generator provides the data needed for creating standard and customized reports that contain any information stored in the BBE database.

Standard and Customized Reports

BBE provides a set of predefined standard reports, such as:

  • Billing summary report
  • Billing detail report
  • Active subscriptions
  • Product penetration
  • Port
  • Subscription status
  • IP Address history
  • BBE User operations

Customized reports can be generated using a GUI tool. Users can create own report templates by themselves or with the assistance PacketFront Software Professional Services.

Billling

The Report Generator gives the operator up-to-date information about the physical network as well as detailed information concerning individual service usage. The provided data can be used for example for efficient billing of services. The created billing reports provide input data to external billing systems. As the billing reports can also be created per service provider, these reports can be used in open access networks by the network operator to bill the service providers.

Standard and Customized Reports

In the Report Generator the user can generate the reports periodically based on a schedule or export the reports manually as required.

By using the API interface, the reports can be periodically generated and automatically imported into external systems for further processing.

All reports can be downloaded in various file formats, such as, text, PDF, Word, PowerPoint or Excel. Excel files can be further analyzed in external applications, such as MS Excel or Crystal Reports.

BBE

BBE is a purpose-built software package which enables easy and efficient handling of business processes in broadband networks.

The BBE is a product family consisting of different modules which can be added step by step as required for tasks such as Subscriber and Product Management, Trouble Shooting and Reporting.