CONSULTANCY SERVICES

Industry Specific Standards

TL 9000

Introduction

The QuEST Forum developed the TL 9000 Quality Management System to meet the supply chain quality requirements of the worldwide telecommunications industry. Based on the ISO 9001-2000 standard, the TL 9000 adds telecom-specific requirements.

TL 9000 defines the requirements for the design, development, production, delivery, installation, and maintenance of products and services. Included in TL 9000 are cost and performance-based metrics that measure reliability and quality performance of the products and services.

The TL 9000 provides value and benefits across the supply chain disciplines, addressing buyers, suppliers, and service providers by providing a consistent set of quality expectations that parallel rapid technology changes and customer expectations.

Benefits of Implementation

TL 9000 provides uncountable benefits - both tangible and intangible. A typical organisation would enjoy the following:

• fulfil one of the conditions of supply
• gain customer recognition and approval and open doors to the worldwide markets
• be able to measure, benchmark its performance and improve
• be able to provide telecommunications users with faster, better and more cost-effective services
• and ultimately, gain in customer satisfaction and retention

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How different is TL 9000 from ISO 9001?

TL 9000 is based on ISO 9001, so an organisation that is already certified to this quality management system standard has fulfilled part of the requirements. An added element in TL 9000 is a focus on performance measurements for the telecommunications industry. QuEST Forum has published two handbooks to guide the implementation of the TL 9000 quality management system. They are the TL 9000 Requirements Handbook and the TL 9000 Measurements Handbook.

The TL 9000 Requirements Handbook contains all of ISO 9001:2000 plus 90 additional requirements specifically addressing the needs of quality management system in telecommunication organization.

The TL 9000 Measurements Handbook is a comprehensive guide to measurements processing, usage, responsibilities and requirements. It identifies performance measurements in the key areas of hardware, software, common, outage and service quality.