Following on from our previous blog post about our industrial placement students, one of their buddies, Simon, has provided us with an insight into their progress so far.
Our industrial placements have been with us for three months now. There were no kid gloves – we gave them an important project to work on straight away.
The problem
Our clients receive supplier fuel price updates from different sources in disparate forms. There is no common delivery – spreadsheets, PDFs and even tables pasted into emails – and there are no common standard or format. Up to now, collating the prices into a common structure has required time-consuming manual processing, with all the associated disadvantages.
The goal
Create a fuel price processing engine – which can untangle and standardize all the fuel price inputs – interpret them and feed their data into our systems in a way our systems understand. And there’s more to it than that. What if something unexpected happens? A new column appears in a spreadsheet; a price list suddenly contains references to airports we don’t know about; there are so many gotchas: and when they happen – we want to know about it.
The process
And that’s the brief we gave our two new industrial placements three months ago. No kid gloves.
They started with an investigative phase, researching suitable tools and approaches. After selecting and agreeing on an approach, development has progressed apace. They have led had weekly update meetings with project stakeholders and their mentors (existing myairops developers). It is a multifaceted problem, and everyone has been impressed with the progress that has been made so far.
Shannon and Karanpal have been un-phased undertaking this complex real-world project. We have all been impressed by their approach, enthusiasm, commitment and problem-solving skills. This project provides valuable experience and knowledge for their further studies and future careers – and we will have significantly improved functionality for our applications.
The industrial placements thoughts
Shannon
When I first received the brief, I was ecstatic to be given the opportunity to solve a real-world problem processing data with a great deal of variation. I am glad to see that this project will impact the business financially and will accelerate the process. Working on this project has been fulfilling and rewarding. I have acquired heaps of knowledge, learnt new skills and greatly improved upon skills I learnt from university. My communication and presentation skills have improved, thanks to weekly meetings and regular updates. I am excited to see what’s next in store when this project comes to an end.
Karanpal
This project is allowing me to implement and build upon a lot my skills and learn various new ones whether those be technical or interpersonal, which is exactly something I was hoping to accomplish during my placement. The project has its challenges in which the members of team have been open to help/guide us through and provide valuable feedback. Other than that I’m really enjoying working on this project as it also may solve a real-world problem in the field of Aviation.
We are thoroughly enjoying having them work with us and we are looking forward to following their progress as the months go on.
