Report: The State of Quality in the Telecommunications Industry

There was overall improvement in the industry average for on-time delivery

(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.

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Comments

Unsupported conclusion?

I read the article, and then also the referenced report. I fail to see how the conclusion made (TL9000 metrics have succeeded in creating improved quality) can be scientifically justified based on the data presented. The results are quite mixed; the trend concluded from the results is significant only because of very large positive results from one product category.
More importantly, there is no evidence linking any proposed mechanism from simply reporting the measurements to the improvements in the reported results. And no alternative mechanisms for improvement in this metric were explored or considered.
Personally, I have observed that on time delivery in ANY industry has a direct, inverse relationship to the general economic conditions in that industry. As industry slows, orders slow as customers make efforts to reduce inventory and match purchasing activities to sales. This in turn makes on time delivery for suppliers much less difficult, due to lower resouce restraints. In my opinion, this study has just demonstrated that the Telecommuncations Industry sector experienced a significant economic downturn from Jan 2007 to Jan 2009 due to the worldwide recession.