Member Insights
My API Story: Quote Management API
We hear from Divesh Gupta, Vice President- Technology and Sales operations, PCCW Global about how the company is using TM Forum Open APIs to automate its responses to customers’ requests for quotes, saving a substantial time and resources to better expend across the business.
My API Story: Quote Management API
We hear from Divesh Gupta, Vice President- Technology and Sales operations, PCCW Global about how the company is using TM Forum Open APIs to automate its responses to customers’ requests for quotes, saving a substantial time and resources to better expend across the business.
Tell us about yourself and your job
In my current role, I am instrumental in developing a custom designed CPQ solution for the company called QuickQuote. This solution automates the entire configure-price-quote process for PCCW Global’s customers; thereby cutting down the turnaround time for quote responses from several weeks to under a few minutes. This automation also ties into the PCCW Global’s overall digital transformation strategy which aims at bringing increased automation by incorporating LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration), SDN (software defined networking), NFV (network functions virtualization) to our international connectivity solutions for our customers worldwide.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
We use TM Forum Open APIs to automate the configure, price and quote processes with our customer and our vendors. Some of the APIs we are using today are: We use these APIs to enable our customers to get quotes for point to point and multi-point connectivity services provided by PCCW Global. The APIs also help to automate the inter-carrier get quote and get price process.
- Product Catalog Management API
- Product Ordering API
- Customer Management API
- Product Inventory Management API
- Service Ordering API
- Quote API
How have you benefited from using these APIs?
As a result of using these APIs, the response time in responding to our customers’ requests for quotes has dramatically improved – from several weeks to under a few minutes! It also frees up resources required to manually respond to such requests.
Where do you use the APIs?
We use these APIs to provide services in over 30 locations on PCCW Global’s global footprint; more locations are being added every quarter. Several wholesale customers and our partners are making use of these APIs to streamline the quote & ordering process with us.
Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?
Some other APIs that we use in conjunction with the TM Forum APIs are the ones for customer premise address correction and geo-coding services. These APIs work to improve the accuracy of the responses and reduce the instances where accurate quotes cannot be found.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?
Standards based APIs make it easier for us to quickly on-board third-party APIs on to our digital platform and make even more products and services available to our end-customers by making the process less cumbersome and tedious.
To learn more about TM Forum Open APIs visit www.tmforum.org/open-apis