Planning and Conducting Field-Tracking Studies

It is the function of Bell Laboratories Quality Assurance Center (QAC) to provide assurance that telecommunication products purchased by the Bell Operating Companies (BOCS) are of satisfactory quality and perform as required. This assurance is provided through the three primary activities of the Quality Assurance effort: (i) Quality inspection and auditing at manufacturing, repair, and installation locations. (ii) Qualitative feedback gathered through informal contacts with BOC personnel and a more formal engineering complaint procedure. (iii) Quantitative field-tracking studies of selected products and systems. This paper discusses the third activity from both a historical and tutorial point of view. The authors relate some lessons and principles learned through field-tracking studies in the past and offer suggestions for those planning to conduct a field-tracking study (FTS) in the future. Formal field-tracking studies were undertaken during the 1960s. The studies that will be described in this paper began in 1973 with Product Performance Surveys (PPS) 1 on Western Electric station sets, PPSS are 2333