Markulik, Štefan
Department of Safety and Quality of Production/ Faculty of Mechanical Engineering / Technical University of Košice/ Letná 9/ 042 00 Slovakia/+421556022600 / stefan.markulik@tuke.skNagyová, AnnaDepartment of Safety and Quality of Production/ Faculty of Mechanical Engineering / Technical University of Košice/ Letná 9/ 042 00 Slovakia/+421556022600 / a.nagyova@tuke.sk
ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT
In more recent years Quality has become a highest warranty for products assessment. Proper tools and equipment are critical components of success; however the most powerful tool how to bring the quality to product or service is to implement quality management system. This helps the organization to work efficiently, with the aim to optimize and improve organization performance. Nowadays, the market does not make difference between product and service.
The most important is a customer feedback, which is focused to fulfill customerrequirements.
This article includes advantage, and issues of the QMS and experiences with its implementation under universities conditions. The paper also shows, how important goal means Quality for Universities and their faculties.
Keywords
Keywords
Quality, University, Process
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
The notion of quality is always very closely connected with the notion of a customer. To address a customer with high-quality products and services, and be also successful in the market means to meet all his/her requirements, and, moreover, do it in a different and better way compared with the competition. However, not only products and services but mainly processes leading to their creation bring a long-term success to organizations. Currently the quality management system certification in accordance with the EN ISO 9001 standard has become the indispensable condition of the long-term development of organizations also in the European market. It represents an important factor of surviving in the competitive conditions, also in the sense of a requirement to prove a certified quality management system, which is more and more frequently posed on organizations.
QMS IN UNIVERSITY CONDITIONS
The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century was and is globally perceived
as a period of ensuring and permanently improving quality in all areas of life. It has reached such a high extent that the requirement to prove an effective quality management system is becoming a condition of survival for organizations. It creates conditions for the increase of its competitiveness. The way how a firm or another institution ensures the quality of its products and organization of related processes is the core element of the quality management system.
With regard to the quality management it must be realised that it is a very inaccurate, even misleading notion. The quality cannot be controlled / managed. Only processes and procedures ensuring this quality can be controlled / managed. Thus it can be said that the coordination of all activities of the organization in a way ensuring that characteristics of provided products are identical with customer requirements represents the quality control / management. [2]
Even if organizations have the best experts, best production technologies (or product creation processes), and use the highest quality materials (in case of products), it does not necessarily guarantee the offering of the highest quality products.
It is up to a customer to decide whether the product is really of a high quality.
The level of quality of a given product is determined by the level of meeting customer requirements.
It is worth asking now:
„Why the quality management system according to the EN ISO 9001:2000 standard has not been generally applied in practice – through implementation at universities“?
A few schools in Slovakia (and in the Czech Republic) have tried to take this step; however, these are still rare cases. So far there has been just one university in Slovakia that has implemented the quality management system as a whole. Several universities have tried to implement the QMS only partially, i.e. within one of their faculties. There may be many reasons for this partial implementation, e.g. insufficient willingness of the university management due to either the lack of interest or low understanding of the benefits resulting from the QMS implementation, or the lack of funds required for the implementation of this process. Another reason is a failure to comprehend the requirements of the EN ISO 9001 standard, which are defined more specifically for the production organizations. The terminology used in this standard is far from the university environment and terminology. It lacks the exact definition of education and research process parameters. Therefore it is difficult to apply the requirements of this standard in practice, which must be at first properly understood and then met.
The majority of colleges or universities are to a smaller or bigger extent composed of several faculties, which may be further organizationally divided into institutes, departments and other work places. The reasons for this may be found in the history of individual schools and universities. From the viewpoint of the more transparent organizational management it is a functional division, and last but not least also a division based on the area covered by particular faculty or department activities.
Based on the above mentioned it is possible to implement the quality management system in two ways, namely:
- to implement one quality management system at a college or university, so that it covers all faculties and work places,
- to implement the quality management system independently in each faculty, provided that individual autonomous faculty subsystems complement each other, cooperate mutually and outwardly they form a kind of a compact unit.
It is important to note that no matter which of the above quality management systems is chosen by the college or university, it is always a step to ensure the quality and effort to meet expectations and requirements of both the international standard EN ISO 9001 and its customers.
The QMS guarantees that customer requirements are sensitively perceived and met in the process of creating a product (providing education).
In the expert practice the opinions of the product and customers of universities vary significantly.
Before a more suitable method of the QMS implementation at the college or university is identified, it is necessary to ask the following two questions:
Who is a customer of a public college (university) and what is its product?
In general the educational process may be defined as a process resulting in the product of education (e.g. a teaching method, text book, HW or SW, form of information transfer and preservation), while an educational organization is the organization that provides the product of education.
In a broader sense the customer is a consumer, client, and buyer (in education generally a person – student or body supporting the education participant) or end customer – person or organization that benefits from the education gained by the participant.
The student is a person who directly participates in the educational process (daily or extramural form, educational course), and for whom the product of education is designed.
The education provider is a person, who delivers the product of education to the participants of education, e.g. teacher, trainer, lecturer or professor.
The product is a result of purposeful activity - process, material utility value as a result of the production process, capable of meeting human needs immediately.
Based on the tree main processes which can be identified in any public university, the product is:
- education (in study branches and educational courses),
- results achieved within scientific and research activities
- subject of a service contract within business activities.
With regard to the definition of the product and division of public university products into three main categories it is also possible to identify its customer.
Expectations Requirements
Study Programs
Contract
Requirements, Draft Contracts
Projects
Criteria of Agency
Fig.1: Exchange relations between the university and its customers
In general the customer of an organization is the one who is the consumer (and user) of its product, and the one who pays for the product (Fig.1).
The customers of the university within its scientific and research activities are both government and non-government agencies which implement the state scientific and EU policies (e.g. the EU 7th framework programme).
The customer who directly enters the sub-contracting relations within business activities is an enterprise with which the public university concludes a service contract, contract on doing work or agreement about renting buildings or premises.
The quality on the academic grounds is not determined only by quantitative parameters, e.g. by number of students, employees, classrooms, laboratories, libraries, etc. It is also necessary to consider qualitative parameters, e.g. academic and pedagogical competences of employees, level of students´ satisfaction, participation of the university in the cultural development, work conditions, academic mobility, etc.
It is very important to distinguish between the implementation of the quality management system and assessment of quality within the university space. It is impossible to assess the educational process quality where the quality is not ensured.
Principally, the quality assessment must be supported by particular indicators [2]. It is suitable to ask:
„What is a real indicator of quality for universities in relation to their customers and other stakeholders? “
Are these good lecturers, highly qualified researches, curricula of individual subjects, education premises or accommodation and boarding system? (Fig.2)
 |
LecturersAccommodation, Campus Surrounding Education Research Workers Study Programs Catering, Dining-room |
Fig.2: Aspects of university / college quality
It is very important to realise that all the mentioned as well as a great deal of the unmentioned is considered in the students´ overall assessment of quality. Principally it is necessary to define priority and significance of individual aspects, and based on that pay adequate attention to them while considering the following fact:
In the area of the university education there are much more quality aspects which determine the general perception of the society. Based on this perception the society decides whether to address the given university – either as an education provider or within a partnership contract. Ensuring the educational process quality is more complex that in case of products, where their creation consists in the proper setting-up of the production equipment according to required parameters and in the statistical regulation of production processes. In this case the production process is clearly determined by requirements of a (usually one particular) customer. Requirements regarding the educational process are concurrently defined by several stakeholders.
It is necessary to realise that neither at the output of the educational process nor within one study programme it is possible to ensure equally well qualified graduates for the practice. To a significant extent the qualifications of graduates are affected by their intellect, ability to preserve gained knowledge or ability to implement it in the practice.
The education may be perceived as a product, and it is formed by several components.
In the culture of universities there is an inveterate idea that the quality can be achieved through top experts. However, the practice shows that this fact cannot be taken for granted. Any higher scientific degree does not automatically guarantee the high quality education service – it is only one of possible conditions.
The characteristics of a high quality educational process are perceived through the following main aspects by the customer:
- gaining skills and knowledge at the level of the current level of knowledge in a given area,
- a possibility of immediate employment of a graduate in the labour market,
- a current study programme,
- processes of teaching and learning,
- an availability of teachers and information,
- an administration and organization (study department, etc.),
- an environment (classrooms, ergonomics).
CONCLUSION
The educational process can in fact be regarded as a preparation of human resources for various areas of human activities. Therefore the quality of this process is of an extreme significance from the viewpoint of the future development of each society. One of the basic and provable ways of enhancing the quality of education is the application of requirements of the standard from the area of quality management in the conditions of educational institution.
The process of implementing the requirements of the standard for the quality management system is a strategic step in every organization. It requires a lot of changes in the management as well as in the approach or insight on the organization.
The process of the implementation of the EN ISO 9001 standard requirements in the system of the university management consists of a lot of steps. These issues shall be described in another paper in the near future.
REFERENCES
- 1. European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education: Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area, Helsinki, Finland, 2005 ISBN (pdf): 9525539059.
- 2. Markulik, Š.: Štúdia procesu implementácie systémov manažérstva kvality v podmienkach verejných vysokých škôl na Slovensku, Dizertačná písomná práca, Košice, 2007.
- 3. Thaller, G.E. : Von ISO 9001 zu TQM : effizientes Qualitätsmanagement / Georg Erwin Thaller. Berlin [u.a.] : VDEVerl., 2001 ISBN 3800726289.
Papers relacionados
