Automated Inventory
Accurate and compliant inventory is a keystone of Telco success. Inventory is often incomplete, inaccurate and overhead heavy for an operator. It is also a significant aspect of any operation to correct, in which many operators spend millions re-inventing and cleansing, taking years to resolve each time. These CORTEX use cases help to frame what can be achieved more cost effectively and quickly to help you get inventory automated and stay automated.
On this page, as you scroll down, we walk you through the key use cases, and on our map, we have identified key benefits and automation you can achieve. CORTEX is helping its customers achieve 99.999% accurate inventory in real-time.
The Logical Design & Assign use case is a key component of automated inventory for logical resources such as IP addresses, channels, VRFs. The logical design & assign activities will read Inventory data to identify appropriate resources required for satisfying the submitted order.
This will ensure that the service is delivered in accordance with the business and technical standards, but also making best use of the available resources. During service cessation, the logical design & assign activities will ensure that resources that are no longer required are returned to the available pool for future use – possibly after a quarantine period.
The logical design & assign activities will read Inventory data to identify appropriate resources required for satisfying the submitted order. This will ensure that the service is delivered in accordance with the business and technical standards.
Stock control is a key component of automated inventory for physical resources such a CPE (routers, modems, phones), SIM cards, and even cable reels.
As part of these use cases, inventory data will be accurately maintained as resources are shipped to customers and returned from them.
Stock control can identify when resources need to be re-ordered in order to maintain a minimum stock level to meet forecast demand.
Mobile number portability affects the status of numbers owned by the telco. Not only must ported out numbers not be reassigned to other customers, but ported in numbers must be returned to the owning operator once the service is ceased Porting.
Stock control is a key component of automated inventory for physical resources such as CPE (routers, modems, phones), SIM cards, and even cable reels.
The Catalogue Management activities include not just the specification of the available vendor products to sell but also their relationship with the telco products.
As the vendor components in the product catalogue are changed, care must be taken to ensure that the inventory system is able to record relevant data (primarily component identifiers).
If vendor components are removed from the product catalogue, existing active instances of them must be ceased and removed from the inventory.
As part of the Resource Compliance use case, inventory data is routinely compared against network system configuration. Discrepancies may result in updates to the inventory data, to the network element configuration, or both.
Tracking the allocation of physical and logical resources to employees, workers and contractors requires recording these allocations in an inventory. As allocations alter – to replace faulty or damaged equipment, or as the allocation is no longer required because the employee has changed roles or left employment – the inventory data must be maintained accurately.