Dr. Aridaman K. Jain

Telecommunications service providers and suppliers have jointly developed a set of measurements for quantifying the performance of the telecommunications products with the goal to drive improvement in the quality and reliability delivered to the end user. This paper describes some innovative approaches for transforming these measurements into dimensionless Quality Indices and rolling up these Quality Indices to obtain an overall quality indicator for a specific product and further rolling up across products to supplier-level. Examples are given to illustrate the computation of the quality indices for specific products and the supplier. These Quality Indices can be used by a supplier to obtain feedback on the performance of its products by comparing their measurements with the corresponding industry benchmarks (best or average) and for developing a plan for improvement of its products' reliability. The Quality Index methodology described here is applicable to any industry, even though it has been developed in the context of the Telecommunications industry.