Total Quality Management in the Switching Systems Business Unit

AT&T's Quality Policy is based on two fundamental axioms — unqualified customer satisfaction and continuous quality improvement. The Switching Systems Business Unit implements its quality policy through Total Quality Management (TQM), which ensures improvement in those areas most important to our customers. This paper includes: — An overview of the TQM system, identifying eight system elements and focusing on policy deployment and process management, — How TQM produces products and services that exceed customers' expectations, and — How the Malcolm Baldrige criteria and ISO 9000 standards support continuous improvement. Following are two examples of process quality improvements, root cause analysis and product quality assessment. The paper concludes with a look at the evolving concept of customer value added.