QUALITY IN RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT .1. RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT BENCHMARKING AT AT-AND-T

As more large technology-based companies use benchmarking to guide their process and quality improvement efforts, they find common concerns. Challenges faced by companies such as AT&T, with many business units working to improve similar processes, result in the need for corporate and local efforts, and mechanisms for sharing benchmarking findings. We find that benchmarking is most successful when it is part of a larger quality improvement effort, grounded in a quality improvement methodology common across business units. The value of our benchmarking findings is usually directly correlated with the quality of our long-term relationship with our benchmarking partner, and we often find that the partner is a customer, colleague/collaborator, competitor, or supplier, and often all four, requiring much thought on managing the relationship. Our large number of improvement teams select some of the same companies as benchmark partners, requiring coordination and sharing of findings. Much attention is given within AT&T to implementing improvement ideas, often combining top-down and bottom-up approaches. Not only are new techniques learned through benchmarking, but implementation approaches as well. Benchmarking is serving as an important catalyst for R&D improvement at AT&T.