The Quality Excellence for Suppliers of Telecommunications Leadership Forum (QuEST Forum) established the TL 9000 standard as a common set of quality system requirements and metrics to harmonize the various standards that govern the telecommunications industry.

The QUEST Forum was founded in 1996 by Bell Atlantic, Bell South, Pacific Bell and Southwestern Bell. Membership consists of service providers and suppliers of telecommunication products and services.

TL 9000 was created for the following purposes:

To establish the quality system requirements for the management of the product life cycle, design, development, production, testing, delivery, installation, maintenance, and servicing of telecommunications products and services;
To provide telecommunication users with faster, better and more cost-effective products and services;
To establish and maintain communication and positive relationships between telecommunications organizations, their suppliers, and their customers.

The TL 9000 standard includes Quality System Requirements (QSR) for telecommunications hardware, software, and services, in addition to, industry-specific requirements, and performance measuring tools and metrics.

The five levels of TL 9000 requirements are:

1. ISO 9001 requirements;
2. Quality System Requirements (QSR) common to the telecommunications industry;
3. Industry-specific Quality System Requirements (QSR): hardware, software, and/or services sectors;
4. Metrics common to all telecommunications sectors; and
5. Industry-specific metrics: hardware, software, and/or services sectors.

In addition, key requirements of TL 9000 are to document product life cycles and prepare a disaster recovery plan.

As listed above, one of the fundamental requirements of the TL 9000 standard is the preparation of performance and cost-based metrics. These metrics are used to measure the benefits, review the evolution of the quality system, identify areas where the quality process improvement will have the greatest cost impact, and provide comparative benchmarking capabilities for the industry.

Prior to the registration assessment, telecommunications companies must submit a minimum of three (3) consecutive months of data (performance metrics) to the Metrics Administrator and receive a Data Confirmation Report.

After successful completion of a TL 9000 assessment, telecommunications companies become registered to the TL 9000 Quality Management System (QMS) in hardware, software, and/or services categories (the combination of the three categories is possible, depending on a company's scope and nature of business).