Quality Management Practices in the Growing Telecom Industry – An Industrial Insight
Quality Management has made significant inroads into Telecom industry worldwide. Initiatives like TL 9000 Telecom Quality Management System aim to provide “a consistent set of quality expectations to drive efficiency and performance” in telecom industry worldwide. Companies are adopting various quality tools in this sector and even the latest Quality Management initiatives like Six Sigma are being used.
Telecom industry is however in its growing stage and reliable data on adoption of Quality Management in this industry, particularly in developing economies, has not been drawn up. An extensive literature review has been done to explore the contributions addressing initiatives and issues in Quality Management in Telecom businesses. In parallel, Telecom business firms in Pakistan are investigated for their current and planned Quality Management Initiatives, including TL 9000.
The primary and expected outcomes of current and planned Quality Management programs and initiatives have also been explored. Telecom Industry in developing economies is attracting huge FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) in Pakistan and India, and in other developing countries; and the trend is expected to continue. The result of this study will contribute towards:
• Decision making knowledge required by current and potential investors.
• Provision of Industrial insight for practitioner and researchers worldwide.
• Addition to Sector Specific Quality Management Body of Knowledge.
Quality in telecom
The definition of “quality”, in the fledgling telecom industry in Pakistan, is at best obscure.
Quality is often defined imprecisely in textbooks (Allen 2006) in terms of a subjectively assessed performance level (P) of the unit in question and the expectations (E) that customers have for that unit. A rough formula for quality (Allen 2006) (Q) is:
(1) Often, quality is considered in the context of many smaller parts of a larger service, such as the clarity of voice, connectivity, courtesy of operators etc, and the key issue is, why some fail to perform up to expectation and others succeed.
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