1 E-mail: radim.farana@vsb.cz Total Quality Management System Application to the Faculty Management System Improvement Radim Farana * * Faculty on Mechanical Engineering, VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic Index Terms: Total Quality Management, Quality Management System, university, achievements. I. INTRODUCTION This paper presents the positive results obtained at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, with the Quality Management System, which was certified in the year 2005. The next step has been done with the application of the system Total Quality Management (Excellence System), according to the EFQM Excellence Model in the year 2006. The benchmark project, realized with many technical faculties from the Czech Republic and other countries, as one of important steps for improving faculty management, is also presented in the paper. The presented paper describes the acquired results of the QMS and EFQM systems and also shows the main goals, which can be obtained by all other universities and educational organizations. An orientation on a complex quality system and the use of the EFQM Excellence Model has improved university life, its processes and efficiency. Achieving official recognition for the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering from the Program of the Czech Republic National Quality Award 2007 and Manager of the Field 2006 award for our dean have been promoted by the other faculties of the university. Thanks to this, I can recommend all other technical faculties and universities to follow this way. The presented results have been obtained during the completion of Specific Research at the Universities with student participation, supported by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. II. QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM APPLICATION The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering joined the project focused on applying the Quality Management System at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava at the end of the year 2004 in the concurrence with the pilot application of QMS at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which was the first faculty in the whole Czech Republic with a functioning QMS system. At the end of the successfully QMS system certification at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in May 2005, it was clear that it would be a long way to fully implement all management instruments, especially those used by all faculty members at all management levels need a lot of work. The university management system is different from a typical company management system. The obtained results from the faculty QMS system have been very interesting also for all other technical faculties. The main goals were presented at the International Conference Principia Cybernetica 2005 [3], the International Conference on Engineering Education 2006 [4], 8 th Conference of Quality Managers 2007 [5] and the International Conference on Engineering Education 2007 [6] as a part of the faculty Excellence System (best practices), described below. It was very satisfying when representatives of two other technical faculties from the Czech Republic asked for cooperation meetings to transfer our results to their faculties. Together with the standard QMS instrument expansion, like processes risk analysis based on FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis), SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis as a background for significant decisions, the consistent utilization of preventive and corrective actions, and joining and enabling faculty staff members, we were looking for the next forms for developing the faculty management system. The QMS model based on ISO 9000 norms is oriented on suppliers and customers, but the university is as complicated and depends on the academic staff, that is we have to focus at least also on the employees. Then we were looking for some more complex system, which can describe the university management system more complexly. Because we were from the beginning oriented on industrial standards, it is not surprising that we choose the system Total Quality Management based on EFQM (European Foundations for Quality Management) Excellence Model. This model was described many times, for example [1, 2] (see Fig. 1), and was recently developed for its application in teaching institutions, for example [9]. An important aspect of the model is detailed self-