In pursuit of vendor quality excellence [telecommunications]

An overview of what GTE Telephone Operations is doing to improve the quality of its vendor relationships and the products and services provided by these vendors is given. GTE Telephone Operations uses a vendor quality process that is thought to effectively build strong customer/vendor partnerships focused on quality. Ingredients of the GTE process include top-level quality commitment, awareness of customer and vendor needs, structured appraisal of performance quality, and corrective action planning in response to evaluation results. GTE rewards its highest quality vendors and works with substandard vendors to improve their quality. Through working with vendors to identify and correct performance problems and weeding out vendors that do not share GTE´s standard of quality, the end customer is more likely to choose to do repeat business with GTE