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SOTS
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Frequently Asked Questions (SOTS FAQ)
- What is excess time?
- What is access time?
- What is the “reconciliation process” and why is it important?
- What do I, the supplier, do if I disagree with the disposition of a record?
- How far can an appeal be taken?
- Can a data record fall under SOTS and not be included in the Administrative Report?
- Should leading zeroes be used for data record fields that are less than the maximum length?
- The Originator name is mandatory for Data Records. What if the record was automatically generated?
- What is “Partial Impact” and when is it used?
- What is “Amount of Service Affected” and when is it used?
- What is excess time?
Excess time is associated with excessive delays caused by the customer that may be excluded from the product attributable outage downtime and included in the customer attributable outage downtime. The amount of excess time must be mutually agreed to by the customer and organization (supplier). The organization keeps records of such delays with specific start and stop times as determined by the organization or provided by the customer.
Excess time should not be used if the entire outage duration is Customer attributable; it is used only to indicate the excessive delay time attributed to the Customer when recovering from the outage. See the counting rules in TL 9000 Measurements Handbook, Section 6.1 (Service Impact Outage Measurement) for more information and examples of events associated with excess time.
The SOTS data record includes an Excess Time field to record the amount of excess time associated with the outage incident. Excess time is also included in the overall outage duration time reported in the Total Outage Duration or Partial Outage Duration fields.
- What is access time?
Access time is associated with delays caused by the inability to gain access to the product due to reasons beyond the customer's control, for example, delays caused by natural disaster or commercial power failure. This time shall be considered in the external attributable outage category, and thus, excluded from the product attributable and customer attributable outage downtimes.
The SOTS data record includes an Access Time field to record the amount of access time associated with the outage incident. Access amount is also included in the overall outage duration time reported in the Total Outage Duration or Partial Outage Duration fields.
- What is the “reconciliation process” and why is it important?
The reconciliation process synchronizes the outage records between the transmitting organization (Customer or Service provider) with the receiving organization (Organization or Supplier). If discrepancies are found, the transmitting organization must resubmit the updated outage record(s) to ensure consistency between the Customer and the Supplier records. It is recommended that the reconciliation process be performed at least monthly.
Reconciliation ensures that the outage databases of both the Customer and Organization are synchronized. This directly allows the Organization to compute more accurate TL 9000 results, but indirectly, it makes sure that the Organization is fully aware of field problems that are being encountered so that corrective actions can be taken.
- What do I, as the supplier, do if I disagree with the disposition of a record?
It is expected that there may be disagreements on how a record is classified. For example, should some of the time be considered excess time, disagreement about the classification, etc. The Organization should contact the SOTS Operational point of contact and appeal any field or fields on all records that they disagree with. Quite often disagreements can be corrected very quickly by talking through the facts. If the first levels of contact cannot come to an agreement, then the decision can be appealed to the Director level.
- How far can an appeal be taken?
An appeal can be taken to the Director level. If there is still disagreement at the Director Level, then the decision of the Customer must be considered final.
- Can a data record fall under SOTS and not be included in the Administrative Report?
No. If the customer and the supplier choose to implement the optional SOTS Administrative Report, then all data records transmitted under SOTS must be included in the Administrative Report, even if the record falls outside the parameters of TL 9000.
- Should leading zeroes be used for data record fields that are less than the maximum length?
No. In order to maintain consistency and to provide more stability for the system administrators who are importing data records, the numeric fields should not include leading zeroes. For example the value two dot one seven per cent should be shown as 2.17, not 02.17.
- The Originator name is mandatory for Data Records. What if the record was automatically generated?
If a record was automatically entered or generated, then the Originator Name and Contact number should be determined based on the Product Category. Enter a name that will serve as the best point of contact for questions on a data record concerning that particular Product Category. Since the most common reason to contact the Originator is to ask questions about the outage, then the name selected for automatically generated records should be able to answer questions for that Product Category.
- What is “Partial Impact” and when is it used?
When there is a Partial Outage, partial impact indicates the percentage of the network element or system affected. The possible values for the SOTS data field are integer values between 0 and 99. See Table A-3 for category-specific guidelines.
The SOTS Partial Impact field is only used when associated product's normalization units (NU) is either Network Element or System. For all other types of normalization units, the impact of the partial outage is entered in the SOTS Amount of Service Affected field.
- What is “Amount of Service Affected” and when is it used?
When there is a Partial Outage, Amount of Service Affected field provides the numerical value of amount of service or network capacity affected. It is only used when the normalization units (NU) associated with the product experiencing the outage is something other than Network Element or System (Network Element/System based outages use the Partial Impact value - see above.)