Teradyne Celebrates TQM 2000: 10 Years of Total Quality Management Success; West Coast Employees Connect Via Satellite Downlinks

Business/Technology Editors

BOSTON and AGOURA HILLS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 23, 2000--Teradyne's West Coast TQM Days 2000 celebration on Monday, May 22, 2000, 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the Tucson La Poloma Hotel, brought more than 500 sales, service and applications personnel from around the world together with another 2000 participants in California who joined the event via satellite downlinks at Thousand Oaks, San Jose, and Walnut Creek. The event was the second of three celebrations of Teradyne's 10 years of successful implementation of TQM, and followed a similar event held last Thursday, May 18, 2000 at Boston's Fleet Center for Teradyne's East Coast and European employees.

"While many companies have abandoned total quality management in their quest for the next management fad, Teradyne has made TQM principles an integral part of its cultural fabric over the past ten years," stated Maggie Cadogan, Teradyne's TQM manager. "Every aspect of the business from manufacturing processes through reduction of product development time to company profitability has been positively impacted by widespread adoption of TQM principles. Today's event combined celebration, recognition of team accomplishments, as well as shared learning."

The first part of Monday's event included a historic look at past TQM Days and Teradyne's major achievements. Professor Shoji Shiba, author of "A New American TQM," and the original consultant brought in during 1990 by Teradyne founder, Alex d'Arbeloff to establish Teradyne's TQM principles and program, presented remarks about Teradyne's progress over the past ten years. Following this, Dr. Danny Hillis presented a talk titled "Future of Technology and Change" Formerly Walt Disney Company Vice President for Technology, Hillis pioneered the concept of massively parallel computers, the basis for most supercomputers.

The program concluded with presentations by three Teradyne quality improvement teams, each focusing on specific accomplishments that solved challenging customer problems and decreased product development time.

About Teradyne's TQM

Teradyne's TQM philosophy is that Total Quality of Management is not quality control. Rather, it is the way Teradyne manages the company as a whole giving it a different focus than that of "traditional" quality improvement, which usually focuses on improving products and services of a company.

In the past, many companies created specific organizations to focus on quality improvement with the basic approach of assigning a group of people whose full- time job was to work on improving the quality of products and services through inspection. Unlike other organizations where quality is a separate function, Teradyne views improvement as an intrinsic element of every employee's daily work.

After careful consideration, Teradyne's management introduced TQM into the company in 1991. This resulted not only in the improvement of products and services, but on the overall improvement of all the underlying systems and process across all company functions. Teradyne's objective is not to only improve the company, but to improve it faster than its competitors.

About Teradyne

Founded in 1960, Teradyne's, Inc. (NYSE: TER) 1999 sales were $1.8 billion. Seven Teradyne divisions develop products to test semiconductors, circuit assemblies, systems, networks and software. Another division manufactures high-density connectors and backplanes. More than 70% of Teradyne's business is driven by the Internet growth. As the world's largest supplier of automatic test equipment (ATE) and associated software for electronics and telecommunications, Teradyne's customers include top semiconductor and electronics companies, testing the latest semiconductors, circuit boards and systems that power today's electronics products from Internet routers to PCs to cell phones and automotive electronics. Teradyne's backplane and interconnect systems are used by leading Internet infrastructure and data storage companies as well as in complex military and avionics applications. Each night, Teradyne communications network test equipment automatically examines more than 115 million phone lines worldwide, helping phone companies target and fix problems quickly.

“Every aspect of the business from manufacturing processes through reduction of product development time to company profitability has been positively impacted by widespread adoption of TQM principles. Today's event combined celebration, recognition of team accomplishments, as well as shared learning.”