A service management system for a communications network which accepts requests for communications services from service order sources. The service management system includes an interface to the service order sources, a database, and an interface to network elements which provide the communications services. The service order sources may have differing order input formats which are converted by the system into a single internal format for processing and determining of provisioning information to be output to the network elements. The service management system includes table-driven logic which is used to validate and process the requests to determine the provisioning information. Once the provisioning information is determined, it is queued to the appropriate network element, and an acknowledgment is sent to the originating service order source. The service management system also includes a interface to query the database and network elements to perform debugging and error correction.