Product and Service Assembly

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The Product and Service Assembly Initiative (PSA), is a telecommunications model which allows new services to be designed, built and marketed more easily. It provides a solution set that allows telecom service providers to organise their business on a 'factory' model that can conceive, create, assemble and launch new products and services more effectively than is currently possible.

The PSA Initiative, comprising a number of carriers, systems integrators and software vendors including Atos Origin, Axiom Systems, BT, Cable & Wireless, Huawei, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Qinetic, TeliaSonera and Tibco, has been a working group within the TMF (TeleManagement Forum) since October 2006, and the systems architecture which it has produced is gaining increasing industry acceptance.

The Product and Service Assembly model (PSA) builds on the experience of other industries, such as automobile and consumer electronics, where the automation of product creation and assembly in a competitive market has long been addressed through a combination of Computer-aided Design (CAD) and Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM).

PSA solution artifacts now available through the TMF include a published NGOSS contract (TMF 211) which describes the role of an active catalog within a PSA type architecture. This document allows Service Providers to request PSA-compliant solutions from the vendor community and gives vendors detailed information on how to comply with such requests. Active Catalog Interface implementation details have been posted on Sourceforge. This is freely available under an open source license to promote ease of implementation and adoption.