As service providers strive to improve business efficiency they need to procure standards based OSS and BSS solutions that can be rapidly integrated and work seamlessly in multi-vendor environments.

TM Forum provides a family of procurement best practice guides and recommendations that service provider members can use to specify required business processes and information models. This greatly reduces the time taken to create RFx documents and evaluate them to ensure that the solutions offered meet the integration and interworking requirements.

We recommend you take TM Forum training on Frameworx in order to use these tools effectively.

You can make use of the following resources:

• The Introduction to Procurement Support Templates document (GB946) provides a high-level introduction to Frameworx-based vendor selection and procurement.
• The Procurement Support Process and Templates document (TMF062) extends this by defining a process for the production of the RFx document as well as covering Application, Business and Integration Framework requirements.

The Procurement Support templates include the following: 

• Process centric template
• Information centric template
• Application centric template

Additional templates are also provided for:

• Overall Solution Requirements
• Existing Applications Integration Requirements
• Application Integration Requirements
• Product, Service, Resource Requirements

Please go to the Downloads area to download the above reference Procurement Support documents.

In our 2014 Frameworx Adoption Survey, 82% of the service providers mandate Frameworx in many or all specifications – and 85% claim that Frameworx Certification for a Product or Solution has an important influence on buying decisions.

Companies who achieve Frameworx Certification for their products and solutions can formally demonstrate their conformance with supporting evidence.

Favoring products and solutions that are certified to be Frameworx conformant further streamlines procurement.  By aligning RFx templates and responses with the outputs from Frameworx Conformance Certification, both service providers and suppliers can remove risk from the procurement process and significantly reduce the cost and time required to issue and respond to an RFx.

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