Quality the Teleca Way

Our core purpose is to help our customers to be more successful. Quality is the way we succeed in that. Our focus is on close customer relationships and the best quality delivery at the right price. Quality is not a separate entity; it is part of everything we do.

How we work with quality

Our way to achieving a high quality delivery is to understand and manage our customers’ expectations. We then execute and deliver according to defined processes that give transparency throughout the process and predictable results that ensure a level of quality that surpasses requirements. We continually follow up on customer satisfaction and our own lessons learned to aid our continuous quality improvement work. Every Teleca team member is important in our journey of making Teleca the leader in our business. We are all responsible for quality.

Figure: Teleca Business Process Model

Our management system, the Teleca Business Process Model (TBPM), provides the framework for working with quality on a global level. We commit to a global approach as our key customers are global; yet, we need to make sure we can adapt to local requirements efficiently. Many of our projects span across multiple sites, setting tight requirements for common quality management. In addition, we ensure we optimize our cost structure globally. We make sure the processes and tools we use suit their purpose well and lead us in the right direction.

Processes and policies are the main content of the TBPM, the management system of Teleca. The basic elements of it are people with the correct and continuously developing expertise, skilled sales people selling our services, and projects for implementing our software engineering tasks. The core processes, Sales, Project Management, Software Engineering and Human Resources map with these elements.

The policies connected to the TBPM ensure top management commitment to several important topics including:

• Integrity – how to handle situations between competing bids or projects with customers competing with each other. 
• Security – principles of security including keywords like confidentiality, integrity, availability and accountability.
• Product liability – precautions of product safety and liability risks and principles of how to handle potential issues.
• Risk – principles of risk management in Teleca governed by the Global Risk Management Board.
• IPRs – precautions for avoiding IPR infringements and IPR retention principles.
• Environmental issues – Software engineering work, processing data as raw material, does not have direct negative effects on the environment, but we need to understand our responsibilities in design decisions, how our offices operate, how we travel, etc. affect the environment.

Key Figures

Our units in four countries, Finland, France, Germany and Sweden are ISO 9001 certified. Our unit in Russia has been assessed to be at CMM level 5 which is the highest quality level a company can get in that well renowned system. During 2008 the separate ISO 9001 certificates will be combined to one multi-site ISO 9001 certificate and some new units added to it.
 
We will also align our measurement criteria as part of global alignment. During 2007, customer satisfaction measurement and project metrics have been institutionalized.
 
Global customer satisfaction follow-ups were initiated at the end of 2006 and further improved and refined during 2007. Customer satisfaction is formally followed at decision maker, project and at resource hiring level. After establishing the basic measurement criteria and improvement actions, targets are transferred to systematical improvements based on the results.

Customer satisfaction results are systematically analyzed and actions initiated at project level, at local unit level, at customer account level and at Teleca group level. Teleca Global Quality follows this continuous improvement and coordinates the process improvement actions together with the process owners.

Going forward

2007 has been an active year for quality development within Teleca. This work continues. From establishing we have changed to listening and concentrating on systematic improvements. A global assessment program has been initiated to assure compliance to processes but also that feedback is received globally. We listen to our people how the processes work in practice. We also have listened and will listen to our customers, what needs and expectations they have for our processes and quality.