Industries

The product catalogue is the modernisation programme.

BSS transformations stall on decades of product and pricing variation nobody is authorised to retire. MENTARA treats that as the first decision to make.

Discuss a telecoms priority Read the detail

More in Industries

The sector's actual constraint

Telecoms BSS modernisation programmes are usually specified as system replacements and defeated by the product catalogue. Decades of tariffs, bundles, grandfathered pricing, regional variations and promotional constructs exist in the current stack, each with a small number of customers still attached, and each requiring migration or explicit retirement.

Retiring them is a commercial and regulatory decision rather than a technical one, and it is nobody's individual responsibility. So the programme attempts to carry the full catalogue forward, and the complexity that made the old stack unmaintainable is faithfully reproduced in the new one.

The failure mode

OSS and BSS modernised separately, integrated never.

Operational and business support systems are typically owned by different parts of the organisation with different priorities and funding, and are modernised on separate timelines. The integration between them — order to activation, fault to billing credit, network state to customer-visible status — is then a boundary neither programme owns.

That boundary is where customer experience actually lives. An order that provisions correctly but bills wrongly, or a fault that resolves in the network but not in the customer's account, are integration failures rather than system failures, and neither modernisation programme will have them in scope.

The second pattern is network data that cannot answer commercial questions. Enormous volumes of network telemetry exist, and questions like which customers are experiencing degraded service in this area require joining it to inventory, topology and customer data that were never modelled to be joined. The data exists and the answer does not.

Priorities

Where the work usually sits.

01Catalogue rationalisationMaking product and tariff retirement an explicit, owned commercial decision before a replacement programme is specified around carrying everything forward.

02OSS/BSS integration ownershipTreating the boundary as a designed system with an owner, rather than as the residue of two independent programmes.

03Order-to-activation flowThe journey that determines customer experience and revenue leakage, mapped and instrumented end to end rather than per system.

04Network and customer data joinsModelling network, inventory and customer data so operational questions with commercial answers become possible.

05Revenue assuranceFinding where charges are not applied, applied twice or applied wrongly, which is usually a data and integration problem.

06Delivery pace in a change-averse estateMaking change safe and frequent in an environment where a bad release has regulatory and reputational consequences.

Questions

What buyers ask.

Do you work on network infrastructure?

No. We do not design, configure or operate network infrastructure, and we would not want a firm without deep network engineering experience doing so.

We work at the OSS/BSS, data and integration layer above it.

Can you run a BSS transformation?

Not as prime. A full BSS replacement is a multi-year programme requiring a large bench and vendor-specific certification.

We fit the catalogue and integration decisions that determine whether such a programme succeeds, and independent assurance of one already running.

Where MENTARA fits best.

Scope

We fit catalogue rationalisation, integration architecture, data modelling and independent assurance.

Network engineering, full BSS or OSS replacement as prime, and large-scale systems integration call for a partner operating at greater scale.

MENTARA was incorporated in July 2026 and has no clients yet in any sector, so the quality of the thinking on this page — and in a first conversation — is what there is to judge us on.

Where this connects

Services

Workforce model

Workforce Administration