In September 2007 at the QuEST Forum I had the privilege of presenting an AT&T in-house Six Sigma process-improvement success story, “Reducing Non-Billed Inside Wire Dispatches,” which was selected as a best practice in the Six Sigma category. (QuEST—Quality Excellence for Suppliers of Telecommunications—is an international group with more than 150 members, including AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Corning, Fujitsu, Motorola, Nortel, Sun Microsystems, and Tellabs. The QuEST Forum was established in 1996 to bring together service providers and suppliers to create a consistent set of quality system requirements for the global telecommunications industry.)

While listening to the various other presentations, I caught a glimpse into what’s happening with U.S. manufacturing in the telecommunications industry, arguably one of the largest and fastest growing sectors in America. I witnessed two dramatically different views toward manufacturing: outsourced manufacturing vs. in-house manufacturing.

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