The Etxe-Tar company has awarded 5 students from Tecnun for their proposals to improve the organisation and effectiveness of the tasks of the workers of this machining systems company. The company set the 3rd year Industrial Organisation Engineering students of Etxe-Tar the challenge of Tecnun the challenge of improving the performance of their workers by designing the prototype of a mobile application.

"We developed a web application, focusing on a graphical interface that would help Etxe-Tar improve personnel management, for example, in assigning technicians to projects," explains Miguel Arribas, one of the students in the winning group. "They have different technicians around the world, and they often need to know quickly which technician is needed for a given project," adds student Victoria Di Fino. "This application would help them do that, so they can efficiently manage all their resources," Di Fino continues.

The challenge, explains Fabiana García, was to design the functionalities of this tool. "We started with a map of the world on which we placed all the projects they have, and we classified the staff according to their skills or availability, either due to visa expiry, sick leave, illness or holidays. In this way, as each project requires a technician specialising in a different area, the tool would allow them to filter to find the ideal person for each case," the young engineer explains.

"They loved it. They told us that it would save them a lot of time when it came to assigning projects, because our proposal was very visual and simple," says Arribas.

The application would also allow them to keep track of the progress of ongoing projects, and to monitor them better, as Fabiana García points out.

"It has helped us to put ourselves in the context of the professional world, in what we are going to find in the future when we are assigned a project and have to carry it out by our own means", says student Luis Elizondo. They all agree that this type of internship improves their ability to work in a team and that they have been lucky because everyone has always been very available and eager to do well.

The awards ceremony was attended by Rodrigo Del Pozo, Project Director of Etxe-Tar, and Miguel Aizpún, Sales and Project Manager of the company. For his part, Aizpún points out that this type of collaboration with Tecnun gives them "a fresh and innovative vision, because they are younger people who see it from the outside and bring new ideas. In addition, as he points out, "we really like the concept of training and the mark left by the graduates. Tecnun and the footprint that graduates leave in the company. There are many former students of the School working at Etxe-Tar, as is my case".

What they were looking for, as Aizpún concludes, was to approach the problems from a different perspective: "We value the projects for their originality, for how they are presented and also for their applicability. We wanted an idea that would be useful to us, and its application is undoubtedly so. That is where the merit lies".