Abstract:

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is a quality improvement tool, widely used at the industrial sector, that allows identify the main failure possibilities in a product or process, the causes, the effects, and the probability of occurrence and gravity. By applying the FMEA, it is possible to prioritize the most critical failures so the most useful corrective actions can be taken. This work identifies the acquisition of skills and competences as the susceptible process to be analysed by this tool in the concept of high education.

This work describes a case study in the Industrial Engineering studies at Burgos University where the FMEA has been applied. The main objective of the work is to identify the main problems of the students in the competences acquisition process. Once the main causes of failure have been identified and prioritized, actions and controls will be established that will improve the efficiency of the teaching-learning process.

The methodology of FMEA has been adapted to the case study considering that the result of the process must be a professional who has fully acquire the competences established as fundamental in the curricula. Five different subjects, corresponding to different courses and branches of the Industrial Engineering have been chosen to applied the methodology of FMEA in a wide simple space. A complete comparative study has been done, finding a great parallelism among the selected subjects respect to the causes of failure and the effects of them. The main difference is in the probability of occurrence and gravity so the improvement action have been should be specific for each subject and course due mainly to the maturity of the students.

Keywords:

FMEA, Higher Education, Competences Acquisition, Strategic Analysis Tools.