Unified Inventory

Many telecom inventory solutions in use today are unable to stay in sync with the reality of ever-changing networks, are often deployed in domain or use case silos and don’t offer the flexibility needed to easily address changing requirements. 

Modern inventory solutions like Nokia Unified Inventory go beyond simple data storage systems to data discovery engines, from manually structured data to auto-correlated data and from being static to being near real time.

This type of inventory system can be used for data aggregation, normalization and as part of a network observability fabric. It serves as the single source of truth for operational support systems (OSS) and business applications.

• It’s essential for inventory systems to work and integrate with systems from multiple vendors while enabling network operators to create their own models, adapters and configurations. Standards-based interfaces and software development kits (SDK’s) are key to achieving this openness and flexibility. 
• Through observability, inventory solutions can discover existing and new network elements (physical, virtual or containerized) in a highly dynamic environment. 
• Data aggregation, normalization and labeling efficiently link inventory solutions to northbound systems. Normalization also enables multi-domain and multi-vendor stitching and the creation of service abstraction.
• Knowledge graphs provide the contextual backbone for autonomous networks. By linking data across domains into a semantic, machine-readable structure, they enable real-time insights, automation, and resilience. Read more about knowledge graphs here.
• Modern inventory solutions are also a key element of digital twins - virtual representations of networks that are constantly updated with real-time data. They provide a simulation environment for planning and operating networks. Read more about Nokia’s “Twin-first” approach here.

Nokia Unified Inventory was built specifically for the needs of autonomous network and service operation. The solution provides all necessary information about services and service assets in near real-time, enabling modern AI-driven service orchestration and assurance. Better data integrity also helps to improve network automation efficiency and effectiveness.

Nokia’s award-winning Digital Operations software is used by over 200 customers globally. Unified Inventory helps service providers like AT&T, Bharti Airtel, Ooredoo Qatar, stc, Telstra and others to design, deliver and assure services at scale and with speed. Customer business benefits include reduced operational costs and improved customer experience achieved by:

• Faster time to market for new services
• Reduced order fallout 
• Optimized field force activity
• Shorter MTTD and MTTR
• Reaching higher levels of automation sooner