| by Bob Clancy
If there's one constant that telecommunications industry managers and executives have dealt with over the years, it's frenetic change. Since the industry was deregulated in the United States in the 1980s, several key trends have created a constant state of upheaval while completely changing the dynamics of the telecommunications supply chain. This article will review those trends and make several observations about the quality of telecommunications for end users as the industry continues to evolve:
• Rapid changes in technology. The industry has come a long way since telephones were tied to a wire in the wall and bulky cellular phones were called "car phones." Continually evolving technology has allowed suppliers and network operators to put more mobility and content into the hands of end users.
• Consumer demand for speed, mobility and content. Because consumers are no longer tied to traditional wireline telephones for voice or data, they're demanding more speed and bandwidth, greater mobility, richer content and more reliable services than ever before.
• Globalization. Telecom deregulation in the United States and other countries paved the way for increased industry globalization, which in turn enabled network operators and telecom suppliers to compete with each other in territories once guarded by government regulations. The global reach of network operators and suppliers has in many cases been positive, but it has also complicated the job of working with suppliers to satisfy end users.
• Outsourcing. A direct result of the trends in globalization, outsourcing has been accelerated by technology enablers, most particularly the Internet and the multiplicity of database tools capable of storing and exchanging critical data such as delivery dates, order status and the like.
These trends have all contributed positively in some ways to the global growth of telecommunications. However, they've also forced managers to rethink how to continue producing high-quality products and services in an environment that adds infinite complexity to customer management and process control.
Managers from global network operators and suppliers began meeting in 1996 in an attempt to develop a framework for managing quality in a technically challenging, deregulated and global telecommunications industry. Realizing the challenges that lay ahead, these individuals met regularly to determine how consumer satisfaction and product and service quality might best be managed in such an environment.
Initial meetings led to the formation of QuEST Forum, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the telecom end-user experience. QuEST Forum currently has more than 150 members in three categories: service providers, suppliers and liaison members.
Full membership is restricted to telecommunications service providers and network operators and suppliers. The liaison membership category is for parties interested in QuEST Forum activities. This category includes organizations involved with TL 9000--the industry's quality management system (QMS)--for example, sanctioned TL 9000 trainers, consulting companies and registrars. Only full members have voting rights. A complete membership list is available on the QuEST Forum Web site at www.questforum.org.
The first major deliverable from QuEST Forum was the development and release of the first and only telecom-specific QMS. Based on ISO 9001, TL 9000 requirements are contained in two handbooks, TL 9000 Requirements and TL 9000 Measurements. The structure of TL 9000 is shown in figure 1.
Although it's impossible to discuss the standard fully in this article, an overview is warranted, particularly a look at how TL 9000 might affect the future of telecommunications quality and customer satisfaction.
TL 9000 contains 81 requirements in addition to those contained in ISO 9001. These "adders" are designed to better manage how products and services are introduced into the network. Network operators historically were provided with products from suppliers that weren't completely ready for prime time. To avoid this dilemma, QuEST Forum members placed critical importance on the requirement for documenting product life cycles. In doing so, network operators could ensure that requirements were understood in advance and traced throughout design, development and release, which allowed providers to predict the arrival of fully tested products.
In keeping with this philosophy, other adders were placed in the standard requiring top management to demonstrate that it was regularly involved with customers in understanding critical quality objectives, measuring organizational performance against customer objectives and resolving customer issues.
Furthermore, TL 9000 goes beyond the ISO 9001 requirement for understanding customer satisfaction by requiring registered organizations to actually collect customer-satisfaction data and base continual improvement on the analysis of trended satisfaction data.
Beside these added requirements, TL 9000 specifies a set of performance measurements that must be collected, used by the organization and reported to a central repository for calculating industrywide statistics.
Firms may register to TL 9000 as an entire company, an organizational unit, a combination of units or a defined product line. The scope statement must be clearly defined and documented in the quality management system. This allows tremendous flexibility for organizations whose products span multiple industries where some products might not be sold to telecommunications customers. A company, for example, that makes aircraft products in one division and telecom products in another could register only the division making the telecom products if it so chooses.
Not all of the 81 adders apply to all registering organizations. The applicable requirements are divided as follows in the TL 9000Requirements Handbook, making it reasonably easy to determine what requirements or adders apply:
• C: Common
• H: Hardware
• S: Software
• V: Service
All registering organizations must fulfill the common adder requirements. From there, requirements will vary according to the specialization of the registering organization. For example, an organization desiring TL 9000 registration that makes hardware systems and software, and provides services related to systems involving installation and/or maintenance, must meet the common adders plus any adder followed by an H, S and/or V.
Adders are identified by subcategory number within the ISO 9001 framework and bring specificity to general requirements. For instance, the ISO 9001 subclause 7.5.3 "Identification and Traceability" can be paraphrased as, "The organization shall identify the product by suitable means throughout product realization, the status of products with respect to monitoring and measurement requirements, and where traceability is a requirement, control and record the unique identification of the product."
The TL 9000 adder 7.5.3.HS.1 "Product Identification and Traceability" states further: "The organization shall establish and maintain a process for the identification of each product and the level of required control. For each product and its versions, the following shall be identified where they exist:
a. Product documentation
b. Development or production tools essential to repeat product creation
c. Interfaces to other products
d. Software and hardware environment"
From the nomenclature "HS," you can see that the adder is applicable to organizations making hardware and/or software. The idea is to say exactly what must be identified relative to products.
To make registrations and resulting measurements reported to the QuEST Forum comparable, registrations are also classed within product-category families and subfamilies. There are nine major product category families, including switching, signaling, transmission systems (including wireless transmission), operations and maintenance, common systems, customer premise and enhanced services, service, components and subassemblies, and end-user products. These categories include numerous subcategories that make it easy for organizations to determine a category appropriate to its products and/or services.
Product categories are changed more frequently than other requirements to enable firms to suggest added categories should they not find a match for their particular products. Product categories are listed in an appendix to the TL 9000 Measurements Handbook and updated on the forum's Web site.
To illustrate how a company might determine its registration category, an example of product families and subfamilies is shown in the table in figure 2.
This product table provides a category code, category name, description of the product or service, and examples of same. If an organization makes cable modem termination equipment, for example, it would register within category 3.2.6.1, "Cable Modem Termination Equipment." In that way all firms or organizations making similar products are able to benchmark their data using comparable data from similar companies.
The standard's unique feature is the system of measurements that leads to industry benchmarking and continual improvement. To register to TL 9000, an organization must submit the requisite data to the University of Texas in Dallas, where a blind repository is kept.
Required data depend on what companies produce, as shown in the chart in figure 3 and the product tables in figure 2. These data are available to member companies and allow them to compare their own performance against industry trends to make decisions about product and service quality.
The chart shown in figure 4 below is an example of an actual trend chart produced by the database at the University of Texas for QuEST Forum members' benchmarking activities. The standard reporting format includes:
• The monthly average of all submissions (green)
• Best in class (blue)
• Industry average (black)
• Worst in class (red)
Best-in-class, industry average, and worst-in-class values are based on multiple-month data with volumetric minimums applied to remove outlying performance data present in monthly or small sample-size data.
As you can see in figure 4, the data show a distinct improvement in network outages attributable to service providers or network operators.
In addition to gathering data from QuEST Forum Best Practices Conferences and other sources, as a TL 9000 practitioner I hear numerous anecdotes about the measurements as well as the value of TL 9000 for providing process discipline.
The measurement that has been the most surprising has been hardware return results and, in particular, the early return index (ERI) results. QuEST Forum requires registered organizations to report failure rates monthly for products shipped.
Data are reported for field-replaceable units returned from product shipped in the six months prior to the current month, product shipped prior to months seven through 18, and months 19 and earlier. By reporting failures based on these product shipment, or basis, periods, field returns can be analyzed systematically and consistently across all reporting companies.
Furthermore, QuEST Forum members, sensing a problem with failures that occurred early after a product shipped, wanted to have specific data in this area. This requirement led to the formulation of the ERI measure. ERI has revealed to component manufacturers solely relying on long-term, mean time-between-failure trends that their product failures were much higher than expected just after shipment and deployment. This challenge has led several companies to take specific corrective action to improve the situation.
TL 9000 has begun to reach critical mass in the wireline segment of the telecommunications industry. The standard has had a positive effect on quality in that industry segment, and it will continue into the future. The rapidly expanding wireless segment, however, is a completely different matter.
According to J.D. Power & Associates' 2006 Wireless Call Quality Performance Study, the number of customers experiencing wireless call problems as measured by reported calls per 100 (PP100) has been declining since 2003. In its recent study, J.D. Power noted that calls with problems declined from 26 PP100 in 2005 to 24 PP100 in the 2006 study, an 8-percent improvement. Other relevant information, such as the fact that outdoor connections are better than indoor, caused J.D. Power to conclude that carriers that pay more attention to individual customer-usage patterns will provide the best call-quality experience.
"With an increasingly competitive environment and an increase in the number of services used in conjunction with a cell phone, carriers that offer superior network quality will improve their likelihood of attracting new customers and will increase customer retention," the 2006 report concludes. "In fact, improving network quality is a beneficial financial incentive for wireless carriers, as customers experiencing at least one call-quality problem are three times more likely to indicate they 'definitely will' switch carriers in the future."
Thus, although quality results are improving, they can still be much, much better. Wireline blocked-call standards are currently about 0.3 percent of all calls, while the blocked-call standard for wireless is 4 percent. What if suppliers and network operators in the wireless space began using TL 9000 to manage quality through their supply chains? Could the rate of calls with problems be reduced to 1 PP100 or even fewer? Wireless network operators outside of North America, most specifically in the Asia-Pacific region, are currently deploying TL 9000. For example, China Mobile, China's largest wireless provider, has embraced TL 9000 as its companywide standard.
Wireline providers learned to balance new features with consistent quality of service. In the United States they learned this lesson through a series of outages in 199l that brought large segments of the network to its knees and caused a regulatory backlash.
Similarly, wireless providers must learn that speed-to-market and feature availability can coexist with consistent delivery of service quality at a much higher level than is currently provided to consumers.
QuEST Forum continues to pursue its vision of improving end-user satisfaction with all telecommunications products and services, and is striving to include more wireless network operators and suppliers in its working groups and networking opportunities. By ensuring wireless participation in QuEST Forum and TL 9000, we can continue to provide quality products and services to consumers around the globe.
Bob Clancy has held numerous management and executive jobs with DSC Communications, Alcatel and other telecom suppliers. Along with his wife, Sue, he began BIZPHYX Inc. in 2001 as a quality management optimization company that exclusively serves the telecom industry. As a leading expert on the TL 9000 standard, BIZPHYX provides customized assessment, implementation and auditing services in support of the TL 9000 registration process. BIZPHYX is a sanctioned QuEST Forum trainer and a member of the QuEST Forum, where Clancy serves on the Global and IGQ work groups. He's also a former chair of the Dallas TL 9000 special interest group and is a member of the American Society for Quality.
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