INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS A CONCEPTUAL MODEL

The objective of this article is to present a model that relates higher education institutions (HEI) and operations management (OM), using a key performance indicator called over-all equipment effectiveness (OEE), which is considered by top management as an essential element for strategic decision making. This is because in the educational field, the concept of quality in HEIs has become an attractive topic, not only for students and institutions, but also for governmental entities, as it has been demonstrated that there is a relationship between higher quality HEIs and social and economic growth in the country. This resulted in a base model, which establishes a relationship between the original variables of the OEE equation: "availability, performance and quality ", with that of the processes of the Higher Education (HE) system: "retention, performance and graduation ", respectively, which proves to be an indicator that contributes to decision-making within the organization, which in this case is an HEI. Although there are efficiency indicators in HEIs, these measure each variable of the formative process of academic programs separately, contrary to the subject of the study, which turns out to be an innovative study, since it seeks to measure efficiency in a single standardized indicator for any career in HEIs. The indicator was tested with a database of a career in the technology area of a uni-versity in northern Chile, which measured the efficiency of the 2006 to 2012 cohorts, whose graduations were from 2012 to 2018 respectively.