School of Administration of the University of Azuay receives ISO quality certificate
As part of a pilot project, the School of Business Administration of the Universidad del Azuay received an international ISO quality management certificate, usually associated with the industrial and business world and which in Ecuador made its first appearances in Higher Education.
As Professor Benjamín Herrera, director of this project, explains, the School of Business Administration, one of the five that integrates the Faculty of Management Sciences, decided to implement a quality management model framed in international regulations.
"It is a management model with increasing recognition and wide application worldwide for any type of company of any size. You can implement it from a law firm of five people to a company with hundreds of employees. But it is always linked to large industries and not to academics, "said the teacher.
The professor added that the management model is basically to define where the institution is going, what are its responsibilities, what are its objectives, its guidelines and criteria: "Every office or organization needs to know its reason for being, which group it serves and which they are the expected results. "
"Several international entities grant this certificate -SGS, Bureau Veritas and others- but we selected ICONTEC. They came in the last week of December and conducted an audit of everything we did at the School to implement the management system and obtain the corresponding ISO standard, "Herrera said.
"There were four days of audit in which, after the application of the respective techniques, we were able to demonstrate compliance with the regulatory requirements and, in this way, obtain the aforementioned certificate. What does this mean? That the School has a model to manage its responsibilities, to define its objectives and its processes, a formalized and documented model, "he concluded.
The idea was born from the thesis of graduation of this professor in the master's degree that he made in the Postgraduate Department of the UDA, then it was developed in the School with the thesis of the students Katheryn Sinmaleza and Isabel Galindo and finally the support of the Academic Board and Jacinto Guillén, Dean of Research, to carry out the project.
"For me it has been a very strong bonding process. I started as a trainee first, then decided with my partner to do the thesis, I learned a lot with the support of Benjamin and the Board, and so far I continue to learn to improve the system, to contribute more to the management of the University, "said the Sinmaleza student.
The next step is to extend this management model to the other Schools of the Faculty of Administration Sciences.
Within the University of Azuay there is a precedent, another unit that applied a quality system within the UDA was the Food Engineering Laboratory, in the Faculty of Science and Technology.
