Politeknika Ikastegia Txorierri obtains the GOLDEN Q-BASQUE AWARD TO MANAGEMENT QUALITY

Politeknika Ikastegia Txorierri comes again to be the first Professional Training centre in Bizkaia in reaching the utmost acknowledgement, the GOLDEN Q-BASQUE AWARD TO QUALITY MANAGEMENT.

It is ten years since our centre started its way through quality. From that January 1995 on, where I had the chance of taking part in some conferences organised by the Monterrey Institute of Technology, we have been able to walk toward excellence, sometimes giving big steps, and some others stopping to step back in order to firmly settle the foundations of our Model of Management Quality. From then on, we have realised there is not just “one-way-only” to develop a systematic and continuous improvement, and that the important thing lies in visualizing our horizon, our goal; in short, being able to strategically manage “the change”, taking advantage of the references given by other advanced organisations; and everything with the objective of obtaining a long-term vision that favours the revision of our model.

Looking back and considering the development reached by our centre, an element that has contributed decisively has been our cooperative singularity, and, through it, the strategic vision that Mondragon Cooperative had when in 1996 defined a Corporative Management Model, clearly aimed towards total quality, taking the European Model of Excellence EFQM as a reference.

From then on, our successive strategic plans have been able to give coherence to the improvement opportunities that we yearly have been able to identify through self-evaluations and external evaluations, achieving, this way, that our Model of Management Quality helps us reach a more efficient organization. Likewise, we have achieved a model aimed towards a global management strategy, able to gather the best performances developed by other organizations, apart from becoming into a social cohesion tool, managing in a well-balanced way customers’ satisfaction, people, collaborators and Society in general, all of them represented in our cooperative.

The long-term planning has allowed us to anticipate the effects of the important changes that have taken place in the educational environment, taking advantage to guarantee a suitable development of the strategies throughout our process map. In this context, our policy of leadership in the use of the new information technologies, has allowed us to design an array of highly innovative iNet systems that have contributed to an effective and efficient implementation of our Model of Management Quality.

In April 2003, our model was assessed by the Basque Foundation for Quality Promotion (EUSKALIT), obtaining the Silver Q-Basque Award to Management Quality, being Politeknika Ikastegia Txorierri the first Professional Training centre in Bizkaia in obtaining such acknowledgement. This achievement was only an attained goal in our way towards excellence. But, as we were making progress, we were improving our organization, always concentrated on the attention to the educational needs of our Society.

The strategic revision made in 2004 helped us think about the necessity of improving the commitment with our social environment, especially with the protection of the environment as far as our personnel and students is concerned. This way, we proceed to set up, as a new strategic objective, the design and implementation of an Environmental Management System that assured the revision and improvement of our recent Environmental Policy. In May 2005, Politeknika Ikastegia Txorierri S. Coop. obtained the AENOR Environmental Management System certification, in accordance with the UNE-EN ISO 14001:2004 rule, being the first Professional Training centre in reaching such acknowledgement. The implementation of an Environmental Management system has allowed us to find out and control the impacts our activity has over its environment, it has made it easy to improve productivity -as it has identified new cost saving opportunities-, and it has shown us to use energy in a more responsible way.

All these changes have been integrated in the different areas of the centre thanks to our Model of Management Quality, making the improvement spreads transversely along all the processes. The last strategic reflection (2005-2009) has represented a splendid opportunity to enhance our model, turning it into a valid tool that grants quality to the new areas of activity we want to set up, which mean a deep change in our social objective. The revision of our map of processes, the innovation of them, the definition of new key indicators and the implementation of iNet systems that give support to the management of the model, are some of the acts we have started and that, at the same time, consolidate the commitment of the centre in search of a systematic long-term management.

This commitment has been recently awarded with the highest category prize granted by the Basque Government, the Golden Q-Basque Award to Management Quality. This fact is nothing but another step towards excellence in the educational area, a field in which our centre has come again to be pioneer, as it has been the first centre of Professional Training in Bizkaia attaining such acknowledgement, showing it has achieved an advanced level in its management performances, a standard we will continue raising aiming to offer our customers the best service, thanks to the commitment with the enhancement of our personnel and their skills to make decisions with a strategic vision.

Juan Ángel San Vicente

                                      Director