Re: TL9000 Implmentation - Has anyone out there been through this?
Yes. I spent the last several years in the USA consulting in TL 9000 implementations to several of the major telcos.
TL 9000 addds detailed requirements to those of ISO 9001, elaborating upon them for the purposes of supplying equipment and services to telecom service providers. They're particularly concerned with 24/7 availability, on-time delivery, low cost maintenance and a stream of new products that meet their evolving needs.
Some requirements are really rather good. For example you have to do decent project plans, estimate software schedules and effort properly -- and you even have to trace requirements through design to test (that's one of the hardest for most companies to do). You'll want to start with a detailed gap analysis, and I mean detailed. Do it to release 4.0 which is due to be published shortly.
You will also have to measure certain metrics, and report them to the QuEST Forum (annonymously) for benchmarking. This is the big, big contribution TL 9000 makes to quality: nobody tried to benchmark an entire industry before.
Customers will ask you what their values are, and you'll have to tell them. Measurements include on-time delivery, problem reports per month, fix response time, return rates, system outage and service quality. Precisely what you measure is determined by your "product category": there are about 100, distinguishing between products like switches, antennae, cable, line cards, routers, subassemblies and so on. The measurements are highly defined and their collection, analysis and reporting processes are audited to make sure everyone plays fair. You must have 3 months of data, validated by QuEST Forum, for your initial audit: no data, no certificate.
Metrics reporting is annonymous, via a secure website. You and your customers know your figures, and everyone knows (from reports on the website) what the average, best and worst are, by product category.
The measurements system can take some while to construct since such data are often distributed around a company in various databases -- and there are several versions for example of on-time delivery, and they're all wrong! (I knew one guy who spent a full two months wandering around his multi-national company looking for database owners who were prepared to write and run the queries he needed.) Do start the metrics part of the programme early, it takes most companies three to six months to do it. Don't bother looking for software tools to do it, there aren't any. (I tried to write one, but every company has a different way of storing data and different business rules that need to be applied to measure it in compliance with the definitions.)
To see the data and benchmark against competitors you'll need to join QuEST Forum (
www.questforum.org) and pay them $10k per year. The upside is you get to go to meetings, influence upcoming versions of the standard, and network with customers and suppliers who are decision takers.
You'll want to train your auditors in TL 9000. Especially, note that registrar auditors are trained to look for the measurements, and make sure they are not only analysed and reported, but that there is management action if they are trending the wrong way: no action = non-conformity. Taht's consistent with Q Forum's intent of driving real performance improvement into the supply chain.
Registrars have to be specifically qualified to audit TL 9000. There's a special class and test, and not everyone passes: telecom is a broad, complex industry and you have to know it quite well to be an effective auditor. The registrar will give you an ISO 9001 certificate and another for TL 9000: it's a formality, they'll audit to both standards at the same time and since TL is a superset of ISO that's not hard. TL 9000 audits take longer than ISO 9001 audits because there's more to cover. Registrars are given guidance on minimum audit days, depending on headcount.
Most companies that do TL 900 find it helps them improve performance. Its guidance is specific to telecom, not abstract, and the measurements are invaluable. SBC for example report that they see significant improvements in measured supplier performance as a result. Another example: at a Q Forum Best Practices conference, Nortel and one of their contract manufacturers (Solectron I think it was) said it had helped them align two global organisations to increase their joint effectiveness, because the measurement definitions enabled them to get on with improving performance instead of arguing about how to measure it. BT and other European telcos also are interested in TL 9000 because of the standardised measurements, which enable benchmarking across the supply chain.
(BTW Until I returned to England for personal reasons, I worked with Excel, the leading US TL 9000 training and consultancy provider, and wrote the electronic training class on auditing measurements that QuEST Forum mandate registrars to study and pass before auditing to TL 9000.)
Hope this helps - do ask questions if you need to either off-line or here.
Patrick