Inventory Reconciliation

While the NETPortal™  Inventory and Discovery capabilities can meet the service provider’s inventory needs, there is often an established inventory system in place that is functionally complete but relies on manual input and update and thus contains inaccurate data.  When the service provider desires to improve the data quality in the existing inventory, they can implement NETPortal™ Inventory Reconciliation to dramatically improve and maintain the inventory system data quality and restore  confidence in the system.

NETPortal™ communicates with Network Elements and EMS/NMS to obtain the network data.  This information is used to update the NETPortal™ database to reflect what is found in the network. This includes the Network Element configuration, connectivity and services that are derived from the network data. This is a key feature of the NETPortal™  solution – the availability of the view of the actual network implementation (the Operations or As Built view), not just discrepancies or another version of the Inventory data.  This image of the network is valuable not only for reconciliation purposes, but is available to other users such as Network Operations or Planning, who need accurate view of the current network.

Periodically, data will be extracted from the existing inventory system using that system’s APIs, processed into a compatible format, and compared to the network data within NETPortal™.  The result of this comparison is a determination for each item as to whether the inventory data is the same (in-sync) as the network data or if there is a discrepancy (out-of-sync).  The discrepancies are determined and recorded and each item is flagged to indicate its status as in-sync or out-of-sync.  The status and discrepancies can be viewed in textual and graphical form in NETPortal™.

The reconciliation results are then used to update the Inventory in various ways:

• Additional attributes (UDA) are added to the existing inventory model to identify whether the inventory entity is in-sync or out-of-sync with the network and the date of reconciliation. This information is automatically updated following the reconciliation with NETPortal™.  Having this information in the inventory results in increased confidence of the Inventory system users because they can clearly identify the validity of the data.
• Using the discrepancy data that was captured for out-of-sync entities, automatic updates are applied to the Inventory system data to synchronize it with the network.  The scope of the automatic updates is configurable. 
• Working in NETPortal™, users can identify out-of-sync information and take action to resolve the differences by forcing the update of a specific entity discrepancy into the existing inventory system to align it with the network data. 
• The user may manually make changes in the existing inventory system to correspond with the network data in NETPortal™.  These changes are then validated against the network data during the next reconciliation cycle.

Using NETPortal™ Inventory Reconciliation with their existing Inventory system, the Service Provider can:

• Dramatically upgrade the quality of the data in the Inventory
• Create confidence in the users of the Inventory that they are working with accurate data

Provide a view of the current network implementation for a variety of other users or systems