One of the least productive battles in OSS/BSS inventory, provisioning, billing, and customer service is over who controls the product catalog. Multiple product catalogs can be as harmful to your business as multiple inventory systems or multitude spare non-integrative billing systems. We haven't really delivered convergence if our customer's experience divergence depending on which service they have been ordering at the moment. Customers figure out pretty fast whether you care not just about them but about all of your own services, or if you really only care about a few.

So what we need and what CRM provides is the single repository for all product information across the enterprise. In one place, it integrates product information and business process as well as the underlying technology. Unified product catalog lets us create, define, maintain, bundle, and market our products, and manage them through commissioning and retirement, while giving customers a consistent experience every time they do business with them.