The need for worldwide improvements in the telecommunications industry, both in service provision and in the supply chain, prompted a group including Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Pacific Bell and Southwestern Bell to form the Quality Excellence for Suppliers of Telecommunications (QuEST) Forum.

The goal of the Forum was to establish a better set of quality requirements that could be applied to suppliers globally with the intent of improving the quality of telecommunications products and services.  It was also recognized that a common set of performance metrics would promote benchmarking and would provide an effective means of identifying areas where efforts should be concentrated.

The TL9000 standard is the outgrowth of the Forums efforts. TL 9000 is an industry-specific quality standard based on, and including, the text of ISO 9001:2000.  The Forum has determined that compliance with TL 9000 should result in benefits including continuous improvement of service to subscribers, enhanced customer/supplier relationships, worldwide standardization of quality system requirements, uniform performance and cost-based measurements, and an overall cost reduction and increased competitiveness throughout the industry.

As a liaison member of the QuEST Forum, Bureau Veritas Certification is involved in the process of formulating the requirements of the TL 9000 Standard.  The TL 9000 Standard consists of two manuals, Quality System Requirements and Quality System Measurements.  The measurements manual defines the measurements that must be maintained by companies based on the product category under which they desire registration.  Companies may also choose to be registered as a provider of hardware, software, services, or any combination of the three.

 The Bureau Veritas Certification approach is founded upon:

 The competence of our auditors and their deep awareness of the telecoms sector, all auditors will be; trained, qualified, have performed witnessed audits and will have spent at least 2 years in the past 10 years in he telecommunications industry.
 Our ability to offer other services if required (Safety audits and assessments, environmental and social certification, suppliers audits, site inspections, radio-emission tests, etc.).
 Our vast experience gained from previous projects such as Alcatel USA, Corning Optical Fibers and Telcordia Technologies as significant clients in the US.  In Europe we have Alcatel BND in Belgium.  On the Pacific Rim we have LG Electronics.
  Accredited by RAB (Registrars Accreditation Board of USA) worldwide to carry out TL 9000 audits

The certification audit approach:

 Upon contact we agree options and product categories for certification.
 A registration profile is also completed; this is required for the RRS (Registration Repository System), which is a unique repository system holding certification data.
 The certification audit is then performed, all key elements of the standard are reviewed and their application in the organisation is audited.
 Compliance with the standard will be wither confirmed or non-conformances raised against specific issues. These will require correction prior to certification.
 A key part of the certification process is to decide scope of product coverage for TL9000. This not only allows any required segregation from non-related activities, but also provides an input to the continual improvement mechanism of the RRS at University of Texas in Dallas. The combined statistics reports provides benchmarking measurements for your organisation in terms of best in class performance etc.
 Bureau Veritas will then confirm all documentation to the QuEST forum and certification shall be granted.