Are there any essential metrics that your OSS is not on the hook for?

I was doing some work on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) within telco environments the other day and it made me realise that OSS can have a direct impact on every one of them.

Here are a few responsibilities of OSS / BSS:

  • TTM or MTTP – Time to Market or Mean Time to Product – If your marketing team has a new product or engineering has a new network model that they’d like to bring to market, it’s the OSS and BSS that are responsible for operationalising and billing the new product. Unfortunately (or fortunately) our OSS and BSS tend to cause some of the bigger delays in getting a new product up
  • Service Level Agreements (SLAs) / Penalties – Ensuring a service is monitored, maintained (and restored if it fails) within SLAs (contracts between service provider and their customer/s). OSS and BSS are responsible for monitoring, identifying or predicting contract breaches and coordinating responses to any events
  • QoS – Quality of Service – In a modern, resilient network, not to mention an automated, self-healing network, the OSS and the NMS (single or plural) under management are designed to ensure that QoS remains high
  • Revenue Leakage – through fraud, ineffective processes and/or incomplete records, service providers lose significant revenues every year. The OSS and BSS provide the data, if not the tools, to identify where revenues are being lost
  • OPEX – Operational Expenditure – OSS have a direct say in the efficiency (or otherwise) of a service provider
  • CAPEX – Capital Expenditure – Significant amounts of capital are invested by service providers, much of it on assets that the OSS / BSS will manage throughout the asset’s entire life-cycle
  • MTTR – Mean Time to Revenue – The efficiency of the entire workflow leading up to service turn-on is led by the OSS / BSS
  • Churn – the number of customers lost / gained – Churn is a compelling KPI because it shows a service provider whether customers have faith in their organisation and its offerings. It’s also an indicator of the health of the organisation as a whole because churn could stem from products / features / pricing, to post-sales-support to service operations. OSS / BSS don’t control all those levers, but collects most of the data to justify lever movements and sometimes has a direct impact on churn too
  • MTBF – Mean Time Between Failures – Whilst failures in the network are not usually the responsibility of OSS, they are responsible for end-to-end visibility of past and current network health, as well as an increasing responsibility for future health predictions
  • ROIC – Return on Invested Capital (or almost any other financial metrics you’d like to apply) – The big difference between CAPEX and ROIC is that ROIC requires a feedback cycle to measure the outcomes on the capital that was invested. The OSS / BSS, whilst often not called upon for this task, has almost all of the data required to monitor and manage the closing of the investment loop (see a series of posts here – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
  • NPS – Net Promoter Score – this recent post articulates how NPS can be impacted by your OSS
  • ARPU – Average Revenue Per User – The OSS / BSS has a little less control over this metric, which primarily depends on the product construct and how attractive it is to customers. However, our OSS / BSS are generally responsible for the delivery of those constructs as well as the identification of ongoing insights to refine product offerings

Is your favourite KPI not on this list? How about this business metrics list?  Not there either? Please tell me what I’ve missed!

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