Download the related report: Dynamic inventory: The foundation of intelligent automation
A small, random, unscientific survey of my fairly non-technical dinner club this month revealed something important about perspective. The following responses resulted from a request to say the first thought that popped into people’s heads when hearing the word “inventory.”
Inventory: It’s what they make the night crew do.
Inventory: A list of stuff
Inventory: An entry-level job with Kelly Temp Services.
Inventory: The single most important element in any value chain and indispensable for communications service providers (CSPs) looking to bring timely, automated communications services, business and personal applications, and media to a world ravenous for them, a world intolerant of excuses and more demanding every day.
The latter is obviously my response. While I would argue that inventory is important to every business, the communications industry is one in which inventory is most essential. A shoe store can be out of stock and customers can either pick another style or backorder what they want. When a CSP’s inventory is “out of stock” or inaccurate, a whole chain of processes can go off track, resulting in delays, a poor customer experience, customer churn, compounding expenses from rework, and many other maladies of business.
In a TM Forum report published this week, Dynamic Inventory: The foundation of intelligent automation, Tier 1 multiple system operators (MSOs) discuss the challenges they are having driving automation across their operations and the ways dynamic inventory is helping them overcome these challenges. The road to automation is paved with data and MSOs are leveraging that data with dynamic, federated inventory systems to speed the onboarding of virtual network functions, support real-time provisioning, and optimizing resources. To do that, MSO are federating data from multiple inventory systems, multiple OSSs, and multiple network domains.
Maintaining the integrity of dynamic inventory systems is much more complex than stocking shoes, but it can be less labor intensive with the right level of automation. The MSOs in this report, along with Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, are working toward deploying inventory solutions that leverage machine learning and AI to enable intelligent automation.
The MSO are not there yet. They are taking AI, automation, and federation one step at a time—and in reverse order. However, as you can see from the chart below, automation is the second biggest driver for seeking to build AI into operations.
Most service providers are still perfecting their auto-discovery capabilities and growing confidence within their organization for relying on the network image that discovery paints. Visibility is great only when a company believes what its eyes, and its data, are telling it about the state of the network.
Inventory can no longer be a static system that relies on administrative input, limited integration, and narrow discovery capabilities. Give the report a read to see how dynamic inventory leads to greater, more trustworthy visibility and more intelligent automation.
