|  In
this fiercely competitive environment, telecom companies are
waking up to the higher and higher expectations of their customers.
It is critical for them to put in place effective, inexpensive
business management systems that help create superior quality
products and services. Telecom majors such as NEC America
Inc., LG Electronics Ltd., Samsung Electronics have found
that the TL 9000 Quality Management System is a highly effective
tool that has helped them achieve these objectives rapidly
and cost-effectively.
What is TL 9000?
TL 9000 is a common set of Quality Management System Requirements
and Measurements designed specifically for the Telecom industry,
encompassing ISO 9001 and other best practices.
The TL 9000 standard is developed by the QuEST Forum (Quality
Excellence for Suppliers of Telecommunications), which consists
of leading Service Providers such as AT & T, Bell Atlantic,
Bell Canada, BT, SBC, Sprint, Verizon and their suppliers
such as 3M Telecom, Lucent, Alcatel, Motorola, Nortel, Telllabs.
The QuEST Forum currently has more than 180 telecom organizations
worldwide as members.
TL 9000...designed to help
Telecom companies
TL 9000 is designed to help telecom companies pursue business
excellence and continual performance improvement by adopting
“best practices” and by benchmarking the performance
against the “best-in-class” globally. TL 9000
helps achieve this by establishing and implementing an industry
specific Quality Management System which addresses requirements
like Customer Focus, Long-and-Short Term Quality Planning,
Product and Service Life Cycle, Disaster Recovery Systems,
Service Delivery Plan, Project Planning, Customer Satisfaction
Monitoring and many others.
The global benchmarking of performance with the “best-in-class”
is achieved by measuring, reporting and continually improving
the Customer Centric Performance Measurements such as Number
of Problem Reports, On Time Service Delivery, System Outages
and Problem Report Fix Time.
TL 9000 and You
As a Telecom equipment manufacturer or service provider, implementation
of TL 9000 will help you:
- Increase Customer Retention by focusing on the continual
improvement of:
a. Cycle Time Reduction
b. Reliability
c. Defect Elimination
d. On Time Service Delivery
e. Customer Complaint Resolution
- Improve Network Performance due to “designed-in”
reliability
- Improve Disaster Recovery and Emergency Response Systems
- Increase Consistency and Operational Efficiency
- Improve Market Share through Customer Recognition and
Customer Satisfaction
- Enhance Employee Satisfaction
- Reduce Overall Cost and Increase Competitiveness
 UL
and TL 9000
UL has worked closely and actively with the QuEST Forum in
the development of TL 9000 Handbooks and in the evolution
of assessment methodologies. UL is one of the first registrars
to win the QuEST Forum approval and the ANSI-RAB accreditation
for providing TL 9000 Registration Services. Today UL is a
global leader in TL 9000 Certifications having registered
more than 85 organizations worldwide. UL’s highly experienced
and competent TL 9000 auditors are strategically located across
the Asia Pacific region to provide you with “global
quality auditing services locally”.
By George Verghese, Lead Auditor, UL India |
