ISO award to boost confidence at IDM

CHANDAPIWA BAPUTAKI
Staff Writer | Wednesday July 11, 2007 00:00

 

Speaking to Mmegi yesterday, Faith Tombale said that the awarding of the certificate does not mean that provision of quality service ends there.

'They are still going to be monitoring us every six months to see if the maintenance of the system on how we deliver services still exists,' Tombale says.

'They want concrete evidence of the delivery because one may have good documents that do not correspond with something that is actually happening on the ground. They are going to keep us on our toes.'

For his part, campus quality controller Gilbert Sechele says the procedure started in 2004 with the making of a quality policy assuring clients of quality services.

They then had to develop a quality management manual with the assistance of quality management teams from Botswana, Lesotho and Swazilad. 'We looked at the policy and procedures and brought it to staff for critiquing,' Sechele says.

An external audit company, Business Direct, was engaged to come up with the necessary documents for the certification and to check if staff understood the policy.

'Training then began on the manuals on all the three campuses to check if they understood the policy,' he says.

A gap analysis was done to determine how far staff had understood the manuals. However, when they thought they were ready for certification, they were turned down by BOBS who did an external audit and found that there were many aspects that needed to be corrected.

They engaged another company, Qualiquest, to work alongside the campus quality control team who conducted their own gap analysis preceded by an internal audit in 2006.

'They re-conducted training on the quality management system. We were finally awarded the certificate by June 2007.

'It shows that our products are highly competitive and companies are free to send their employees here knowing that we abide by international standards of providing quality services,' Sechele says.