Quality Management at AT&T Bell Laboratories

The true measure of a product's quality is the degree to which its customers are satisfied. Thus, the quality of a product encompasses all aspects of how it is designed, manufactured, and delivered. Hence, the responsibility for quality cannot reside in any single or small group of organizations, Instead, each organization involved in the product life cycle must understand how it contributes to the aspects of quality perceived by the customer and then work to deliver those aspects of quality. R&D organizations have a key role in determining product quality, in that they must provide a design for a product that satisfies both the end user and the internal users of the design: manufacturing, installation, product documentation writers, etc.