Product rationalisation: why catalogue cleanliness is the foundation of the digital journey

Product catalogues provide the means to build, launch and manage all your offerings, but without the right controls they rapidly become clogged with an ever-growing list of outdated products and packages. How can CSPs tackle the challenge of legacy products and transform their catalogues into strategic assets?

A streamlined product catalogue is arguably the foundation for all digital transformations, providing a well-structured and comprehensive range of products with up-to-date prices and specifications.

However, the reality for most CSPs paints a very different picture.

Over many years of serving their customers, CSPs inevitably accumulate vast arrays of legacy products, and for a variety of reasons these products do not get updated, re-priced or retired.

These continue to persist in their systems, creating a complex web of outdated offerings that prove increasingly difficult to manage. Perhaps most significantly, CSPs face substantial revenue leakage through obsolete pricing structures and missed opportunities for optimisation. Furthermore, maintaining these legacy products demands considerable time and resources, draining operational efficiency to support what is often only a handful of customers.

When CSPs embark on digital transformation initiatives, the challenge of legacy products becomes even more pronounced.

On one hand, undertaking product rationalisation before a migration requires significant resources and complicates revenue assurance across systems. On the other, delaying the process and migrating legacy products into a new BSS/OSS carries forward existing problems and inefficiencies, and results in more effort to implement and test all the additional products.

Furthermore, as timelines tighten and the pressure to complete the transformation is on, rationalisation efforts often get deprioritised or abandoned entirely.

So they’re caught between a rock and a hard place.

This is where product catalogue only projects are different, and a lot more focus can be given to the preparatory work around product strategy and cleanliness – work that often gets sidelined in a full BSS transformation.

What key challenges do CSPs face while undertaking product rationalisation? In our experience, we find there are a number of factors to consider:

The legacy product catalogue

• Product complexity
  CSPs often have a large number of legacy products and services, many of which have evolved organically over the years without a centralised catalogue. These can contain mismatches in metadata, incomplete or outdated information, and non-standard naming conventions across systems, resulting in significant data cleansing and validation efforts. This leads to overlapping and redundant products with subtle variations in features or pricing.
• Fragmented catalogues across systems
  Most CSPs have separate commercial and technical catalogues, which are often stored and duplicated in multiple systems. This fragmentation makes it difficult to map existing products to a new, unified product catalogue without a structured approach.
• Old systems that make change prohibitively expensive
  Organisations frequently find themselves constrained by outdated technology that wasn't designed to handle modern product portfolios. The cost of adapting or upgrading these systems often results in workarounds which further complicate the product structure and make rationalisation even more complex.

Customer experience

• Impact on customer experience
  Rationalising products and transitioning customers to a new set of offers needs to be seamless. Any mishandling can lead to confusion, customer churn or billing errors, especially for high-value business customers who may have their own bespoke deals.
• Time and cost overruns
  Without a clear plan, product rationalisation can take much longer than expected, impacted by scope creep and cost escalations, making it difficult to deliver the anticipated customer benefits within budget and timeline.
• Valuable customers on legacy plans who might churn
  These customers may have been with the CSP for many years and are often enjoying special terms or features that are no longer commercially available. The potential loss of revenue from these customers can sometimes outweigh the operational benefits of rationalisation.

Company culture

• Resistance to change
  Different departments often have their own vested interests, making it difficult to gain consensus on which products should be rationalised or retired, and agree how to map existing products to new ones, whilst managing dependencies and co-existence scenarios. This resistance is compounded by the fear of disrupting existing services or alienating a segment of the customer base.
• Lack of priority
  Product rationalisation initiatives often compete for resources with more visible customer-facing projects or regulatory requirements. Despite the potential long-term benefits, these projects can be viewed as "hygiene" activities rather than strategic initiatives. This perception can lead to chronic under-investment and delayed implementation.
• Management is simply not aware of these problem products
  Without clear insights into product performance, customer usage patterns and maintenance costs, decision-makers struggle to identify which products should be prioritised for rationalisation. This lack of visibility can lead to delayed action on underperforming products and missed opportunities for consolidation.

Despite the above challenges, product rationalisation remains a critical step in product catalogue implementations and full BSS/OSS transformations. It offers numerous benefits including streamlined operations, reduced overheads and improved time-to-market for new offerings.

So how can CSPs ensure that product rationalisation gets the focus it needs and is not dropped or deprioritised once time and resource constraints set in?

1. Start with a clear vision and business case before beginning the product rationalisation process, defining the objectives and success criteria for the exercise – whether it’s improving time-to-market, reducing operational costs or enhancing customer experience, a clear business case will help guide decisions.
2. Avoid customisation and stick as closely as possible to the standard features of the new product catalogue. Trying to mirror the legacy system defeats the purpose of a transformation and increases long-term TCO.
3. Engage with vendors who have proven experience in brownfield implementations. Seek references and case studies to understand how they’ve managed similar transformations for other CSPs.
4. Invest in change management and stakeholder alignment to avoid conflicts. Staff training and communication are key to a successful transformation.
5. Be prepared for co-existence and interoperability, ensuring that both catalogues can communicate seamlessly during this transition. In many cases, old and new systems may need to run in parallel for a period.
6. Set realistic expectations and timelines with internal teams and stakeholders and allow time for iterative reviews and refinements.
7. Keep customer impact at the forefront, ensuring that they benefit from the change, be it through simpler product choices, better pricing or enhanced service quality.

Nevertheless, product rationalisation isn't just a one-off task to be tackled during digital transformation, it must be an ongoing process to maintain a competitive advantage. The path forward requires acknowledging the technical and business challenges, and leveraging best practices to embed product rationalisation into day-to-day operations that benefit both the business and its customers. Only by treating it as a continuous process, rather than a one-time event, can CSPs create a foundation for sustainable growth.

Are you struggling to manage an ever-growing catalogue of legacy products and services? Cerillion’s Enterprise Product Catalogue can help you streamline your offerings and prepare your business for successful digital transformation. Contact our team today to learn how to unlock the full potential of product rationalisation.