GSB Student Talked about his Experience of Working on a Project within the Framework of the Student Groups Project Contest
Stanislav Trofimov, a 4th-year student of the ‘Business Informatics’ programme, shared his experience of working on a project that deals with development of a system, which monitors and analyzes technical condition of buses for transport companies.
Stanislav received financial support for his project from HSE Graduate School of Business within the framework of the Student Groups Project Contest. We covered the results of his project earlier, and now we asked Stanislav to tell us about his experience of working on this project, the difficulties he faced, and the way he sees the future of the project.
Why did you decide to participate in the contest with this particular project?
Since 2018, I have been working on bus maintenance in Yaroslavl. In the field of public transport, I am especially interested in supporting its operations. I am studying on the ‘Business Informatics’ programme, so I am constantly in search of ways to improve existing processes with the help of IT. This is how I came up with the idea to collect and analyze data on condition of buses in a single service to predict possible malfunctions.
Was it easy to gather people for a team of your project?
It was not difficult to find people. The most important thing is to have a clear understanding of what you want to do and what kind of people you need for that. We wanted to make an IT product and take over the engineering part. I believe that the best IT specialists at HSE are members of ‘Business in .RU Style’ student organization. While working on the project I was engaged in the development of this organization. Most members of the project team came from this student organization.
What was the most difficult part of project implementation?
The most difficult was to develop a system which would be a software product and would interact with the environment using the right set of components, in our case – sensors. We are still working on quality data collection and its transfer to the servers in the form of time series. We are looking for the best component configurations and improving the received MVP.
What did the company think of the idea of your project? How did they evaluate the results?
The main customer of the project was a private carrier Voznichy Ltd. in Yaroslavl. The top management of the company was enthusiastic about the idea of creating and testing a system of sensors and analytics because potentially it can be used on a larger scale and have a positive effect on the business.
Carrier highly assessed the results of the project. We continue cooperating with Voznichy Ltd. and together we are determining the future of the project.
How do you see the future of your project? Does it have potential?
Of course, I believe that the project has potential. Now it is important to finalize the IT system, select the required configuration of sensors and test it on 20-30 buses in Yaroslavl, the Voznichy Ltd. company has already agreed to run tests. At the same time, I am registering a company that will work on developing this system. I am planning to start working in Yaroslavl Oblast and then enter neighbouring regions – Vologda, Vladimir, Kostroma, Ivanovo.
What have you learned from your participation in the project?
For me, working on the project was the first time I experienced dealing with money of investors. We had an opportunity to do something with invested money (in a slightly altered format) instead of our own money or a loan. The need to report to GSB, a large budgetary institution, allowed me to learn to better assess the timing of payments and manage the expectations of counterparties. I would like to point out that the reporting process was clear and transparent. I hope that the university will continue supporting student projects in future.
