Metals & Engineering Corporation (MetEC), the state-owned military-industrial conglomerate, lost one more department that has been working on quality assurance and certification.

Last month, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) approved a request that moved the Quality Engineering Centre of MetEC to the Technology & Innovation Institute. Established under MetEC in 2009 and started service three years later, the Centre has been calibrating the quality of the product made by the Corporation.

The letter from the Office of the Prime Minister has incorporated the Centre into the newly established Institute, which operates under the Ministry of Innovation & Technology.

TheCentre has laboratory facilities with pressure, electric, metal and liquid machines that are used to measure quality.

Operating with 72 employees, the Centre has been involved in confirming the quality of telescopes and military radios. It also got involved in quality inspection for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) over the past several years.

The Centre has four institutes operating under it, namely the Calibration & Testing Laboratory Institute, the Project Quality Standard & Certification Institute, the Precision Equipment Maintenance & Manufacturing Institute and an institute that provides training and technical support.

It was only providing service to the products of the Corporation, not industry operators, a shortfall that the new restructuring hopes to ameliorate.

Moving the Centre to the Institute was recommended by a committee that was formed from MetEC and the Institute eight months ago. The 10-member committee had conducted an assessment and forwarded the recommendation to the Office of the Prime Minister.

The Centre was not performing as effective as it was expected, according to Ahmed Hamza (Brig. Gen), director-general of MetEC.

Sandokan Debebe, director-general at the Technology Innovation Institute that was established last year, also says that the Centre did not go with MetEC’s mission.

"[MetEC] was in charge of producing industrial products," said Sandokan, "while giving standards is normally a mandate of a third party."

The duties of the Centre overlap with the department at the Institute, and that is why it was moved there, according to Sandokan.