Report: The State of Quality in the Telecommunications Industry

(QuEst Forum: Dallas) -- QuEST Forum unveiled its inaugural report on the state of quality in the telecommunications industry at the 2009 Asia Pacific Best Practices Conference, which was held Oct. 20–22 in Shanghai. QuEST Forum pursues the goal of global telecommunications quality and industrywide performance excellence through its TL 9000 standard.

Building on ISO 9001, TL 9000 provides the telecommunications industry with a consistent set of quality expectations that parallel rapid technology changes and customer expectations. TL 9000 is set apart from other quality management systems by its performance data requirement, and as the keeper of the TL 9000 data, QuEST Forum is in the unique position to quantify the state of telecom industry quality.

To ensure the creation of a credible study containing independently audited data, QuEST Forum engaged acknowledged communications technologies experts from worldwide voice, data, and video companies, such as AT&T, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, BigBand, Telmar, Adtran, and Juniper. Furthermore, QuEST Forum also utilized the expertise of the University of Texas at Dallas to support the team with cutting-edge techniques and tools. 

Since the amount of TL 9000 data is vast, covering 47 TL 9000 measurements, 126 product categories, and 869 registrations, this study focuses on a single TL 9000 measurement—on-time delivery—across a sample of representative product categories throughout a two-year period during 2007–2008.

On-time delivery measures the timeliness of the delivery of products and services to customers. This measurement is used to evaluate organizations on their on-time delivery performance as they strive to meet expectations on orders of any kind from the customer. However, it is not the intent of this measurement to assess an organization’s ability to meet its commitments for the release of new designs.

During the two-year on-time delivery measurement study, key findings included the following:

• There was overall improvement in the industry average for on-time delivery with an absolute increase from 75 percent to 81 percent.
• The overall worst-in-class industry statistic improved with its median trend rising from 22 percent to 42 percent and its average trend improving from 30 percent to 54 percent.
• The best-in-class performance statistic was very strong and stable with a narrow overall range of 12 percent (between 88 percent to 100 percent).

A major premise behind QuEST Forum’s inception was that as organizations used TL 9000 data to drive improvement, the net effect over time would be an overall improvement in the quality of the telecom industry. While there are many factors that could be responsible for any shift in measurements, it is apparent that the founding intent of the QuEST Forum, and the intent of QuEST Forum and TL 9000 to improve telecom quality is being realized.

To download the on-time delivery measurement study in its entirety, click here [1]. To request a hard copy of the study, please contact QuEST Forum at information@questforum.org [2].