SOTS Process

SOTS is a system for transferring the information needed to calculate field performance data from customers to a TL 9000 certified organizations in a format that can be easily automated between the computer systems of the customer and the TL 9000 certified organization. Information Technology or Database professionals who work in the customer and TL 9000 registered supplier organizations can use SOTS be automate the transfer of field performance data between the computer databases of customer organizations and TL 9000 certified supplier organizations.

Each organization establishes its own implementation of the SOTS following the SOTS Implementation Guidelines. Key elements of any SOTS Process implementation include:

• Collection and retention of outage event information by the customer
• Transmission of outage event information to the supplier
• Record acceptance process, including retention of outage information, by the supplier
• Reconciliation process intended to eliminate differences between the outage event information retained by both the supplier and the customer

The Record Acceptance Process focuses on the initial scan of the outage data against the SOTS data record specifications. The Reconciliation Process focuses on the outage data itself to verify that it accurately describes the outages. Once SOTS data records are accepted by the Supplier organization, they should then be routed to the correct product support organization internally for reconciliation. This helps ensure the product managers and customer service engineers are aware of field outages as soon as possible.