In present time, the number of institutes offering higher education has been increased tremendously and with such large growth in the number of institutes, the competition among them is also increasing at an exponential rate. In this fast-changing world of education, quality assurance of higher education has become the need of the hour. Quality assurance is a comprehensive approach that covers all the guidelines, actions and measures adopted to serve the needs of institutional stakeholders that safeguard the quality of institute in all aspects.
Accreditation refers to the evaluation performed by some regulatory bodies educational institutions to check if they have met basic educational standards established by these agencies in collaboration with educational institutes. These standards are designed to reflect the qualities of a sound educational programme and there is a rigorous examination procedure implemented by the accreditation agency for assuring the quality and academic standards of an institute. Accreditation pushes the institute to maintain its academic excellence and builds a certain level of trust and accountability of a program or an institute among students and their families.

Procedure of accreditation: The rigorous process of accreditation constitutes the following steps:
1. Establishment of standards: Basic quality measuring standards are established by accreditation bodies in collaboration with educational institutes.

2. Self-Evaluation: In-depth self-evaluation is performed by the particular institute or program that seeks the accreditation to assess its own performance as per the standards established by the regulatory bodies.

3. Team Evaluation: A representative group of the accreditation body visits the institute or program to check the authenticity of quality assurance as per the established standards.

4. Decision: After the evaluation done by team, the particular institute or program is decided to be given accreditation or re-accreditation status by accreditation agency and result is officially published with other accredited or re-accredited institutions or programs.
5. Monitoring: Regular monitoring of institution or program is performed by accreditation agency in the period of accreditation granted to validate the quality assurance of the applicant as per the established standards.

Accreditation management system: The top accreditation bodies in India are University Grant Commission (UGC), National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), National Board of Accreditation (NBA) and Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Each accreditation agency has its own objectives that are to be validated by the applicant (institution or program) and as per the established standards, the applicant is required to generate data of several years for the verification. If this data gathering process is carried out manually, it takes considerable time and labour of faculty members and other staff of the institute every time depending on requirement of different regulatory bodies. Once the data is gathered, next step is to perform self-evaluation which may be complex and error-prone if performed manually. .

Therefore, High Education Institutes (HEIs) face many challenges in their path of accreditation like repetitive data gathering and formatting, data privacy and generation of self-assessment and evaluation reports. In the era of digitization and automation a reliable Education Management System (EMS) offers a cloud-based accreditation management system that assists colleges and Universities by automating tasks for accreditation management with a workflow that is customized as per the reputed accredited agencies.
Here are some features of accreditation management system which are important for a hassle-free accreditation journey:

1. Students’ Database: Maintenance of students’ data is an inevitable element of accreditation. EMS provides a digital platform that stores and manages the students’ data including their academic and personal details of successive years in a centralized database system that can be accessed anytime and from anywhere.

2. Data Entry from various stakeholders: An efficient Accreditation management system provides room for the data entry from various stakeholders like there are different formats and windows to gather the feedback on curriculum or generic facilities from students, parents and employers on a central platform which can be used by institutes in the process of accreditation.

3. Implementation of Outcome Based Education (OBE): In India the implementation of OBE has been mandated by almost all accreditation bodies. Accreditation management system eases the process of Continuous Quality Improvement which is the basis of OBE by allowing teachers to track and evaluate the students’ performance in subsequent years and also enables them to restructure assignments and other question banks in accordance with Bloom’s Taxonomy.

4. Documents on Cloud: Accreditation management system offered by EMS allows creating, compiling, and saving the digital format of all the documents related to Compilation of all the documents related to information required for regulatory bodies which ensures data privacy and security.
5. Generation of self-evaluation reports: Self-assessment is one of the important steps of Accreditation process. But with the huge amount of data of stakeholders, such kind of report generation task is a complicated procedure. But Accreditation management system simplifies such complex task by producing error-free reports in required formats.

From the above-mentioned functionalities, it can be realized that a versatile accreditation management system allows saving time, effort and resources of the faculty members and other staff involved. It also allows the top management to review the progress of the work that ensures the preservation of data quality and integrity.