 Now, we are going to look at the most important aspect of service offering. The services which the network service providers and the telecom operators provide are known as products. Now the diversity of the products actually requires each product to be so well defined, well documented and so well planned in terms of tariffs that the customer feels no hesitation to get the service through that particular product. In this module, we are going to look at the concept of product cataloging. Catalog actually is the listing of the features of anything. In this case, the product catalogs. We are going to look at what is cataloging and what are the implications of cataloging in terms of service provisioning and corresponding impact on tariffs. So first of all, let's look at what do we mean by a service? A service is basically a tangible product that a certain customer might be using. Each service provider is interested in maximizing the products. This process is known as product diversification. From the earliest days of the telecommunication services, particularly mobile communication services in Pakistan, if you recall, the most widely adopted product was the handset subsidies. This was a very well thought out but obsolete now mechanism of offering a certain handset to customers on the basis of long term engagement. So the handset actually would be given to the customer at highly subsidized price for as long as the customer agrees to stay with the service provider for a certain stipulated time period. So different kinds of handsets and accordingly different tariff tariff plans were offered to different end users across different service providers. In addition, certain value added services were also included in a packaged form. These value added services also known as bundled services are offered either as part of the handheld device or the handset subsidy or as a separate product as such. These value added services actually meant that you could have basic voice calling. In addition, if you pay a little more surcharge, you could be offered SMS. With a little more money, you could be offered some basic quality of internet connectivity. However, if you just look at the offering in terms of packages that could vary from few hundred rupees to maybe few thousand rupees. And then it is also the effort of every service provider to think to keep thinking about offering new products. Such product diversification in principle looks good. But if you diversify it way too much, it has a direct effect on the overall management cost of these products. Because after all, the cataloging of these products at the end of the service provider means that a complete record of which service is being used by how many customers for how long duration is going to generate how much of money. This is going to result into a pretty complicated calculation and bookkeeping. So while every customer would be offered a broad range of products, these products would remain tangible and manageable. So these services, which are the products in this case, would actually be provided while keeping the associated tariffs visible and limited. What it means is the products which are being offered actually would have to be translated in different payment payment plans. Now these payment plans are such which show a clear advantage of the later of the on the former. What it means is that with increasing payments, the users are actually encouraged to move from the simpler product to a more value added product by paying that extra money. The internal calculations might be very conservative, but in terms of offering, it is shown to the end users that they are going to have a significant performance gain when they move from a basic product to a more advanced product. So the product description is done through the process of cataloging. So cataloging is a very fine grained description of the product and this is what makes companies successful or what makes the companies disappear. So at the end of the day, a company is known to be different or superior to another company on the basis of the products which it offers and each product is known for the interesting features and aspects which it has. The product actually is defined by the services, but provisioning of these services is a whole process comprising various sub processes. These include what exactly would a product do, what is going to be the rate for getting that product over hours, days, months starting from kilobytes going up to gigabytes if in terms of SMS and SMS to maybe a bundle of a thousand SMS and how would these be charged? For instance, when we talk about making a call to someone, when we attempt a call, dialing takes place. The moment the called party accepts the call that is takes the call off the hook, it means the call is established. So the charging is going to start from the first second when the call is established. If the billing period is one minute, it means after the completion of 60 seconds, the next amount that would be charged for the subsequent minute would start from the 61st second. It looks quite natural. It has to be done this way, but most of the companies to compete for profit margins and to grab wider subscriber base offer the charging on the basis of tens of seconds. Sometimes it is done for 30 seconds and sometimes it is done for 20 seconds. It means a customer can make a call and if the call lasts for 30 seconds, the customer would not be charged for complete one minute. Instead the customer would be charged for 30 seconds. Now bring it down to 20 seconds or to 10 seconds. It means now the customer is being given the allowance or the freedom to make a call in minimum possible amount. Now this is the kind of fine tuning or the fine grained implementation of charging, which on the face of it looks quite simple, but when you scale it up to tens to hundreds to thousands to million customers, which is the eventual dream and goal of every service provider, the problem gets fairly complicated because it would involve computation, it would involve precise timing. This calls for some really heavy investment. And of course after the user is charged, then the user is billed. And of course all this activity is preceded by a very thorough marketing and sales activity. This sale is mostly done to an individual, this is known as retailing. If we are talking about individuals like myself or you as a person, it means that the retailing is going to be a process of giving you a certain product. But it could also be done for the corporate. The corporate is basically a package that includes subscriptions for a certain number of users. And in order to have a goodwill relationship with you long term, the service providers always take care of the customer through their customer care representatives. Now the quality of the service and the quality of billing is directly related to the accuracy and the quality of the catalog which is developed. Let's look at the relationship between the product catalog and the aspects which are included in here. This particular object model is of a product catalog in which we have the product with various types and in each type with various options, a product could be offered to more than one user. A user is actually an individual with an account. The account is sometimes known as a wallet. The each option can be offered to a user or a group of users and multiple users can have multiple options. It means we have a one-to-one and many-to-many relationship and a one-to-many relationship in here. We also see commercial channels or the communication means through which the product is offered. In this case, we look at the commercial channels like a broadband wired connectivity, a wireless connectivity or any other particular type. So essentially, the product is described by the catalog with its basic and advanced features and individual and additional options. The product catalog actually has direct pairing on the service which it offers. It means the information which is included in the catalog is all what the product is. Maybe any discrepancy or any conflict in the product catalog if it is not documented there might lead to some problems because the diagram that we just saw has in fact a double arrow or a single arrow that is a many-to-many or many-to-one relationship. So it means that the factors have to be catered in while describing the product catalog to make sure that every possible eventuality or a possible outcome is already catered for when that product catalog is developed. Once the product catalog is there, then it is the process of charging or billing for that particular catalog. This actually involves the activation of a certain product feature that is whether it is the product type or the product options. Corresponding fee is straight away charged when the product is initiated. Then a certain billing is done at regular intervals of time. And then depending upon a unique requirement that a user makes, for instance getting a service on top of the basic services like if you are interested in subscribing to Netflix movie watching on a certain service provider, then the service provider is going to charge you for the Netflix service which it offers you in addition to the basic connectivity it provides to you. And then the measurement is also done, also known as metering, to make sure that you are charged correctly for the amount of service in a product that you've used. It could be represented in seconds, in bytes, megabytes, and then the number of web pages or if you are looking at the online gaming, the number of levels that you've covered in a certain game.