The Tournament In Management and Engineering Skills (TIMES) is the largest pan-European case study competition for Industrial Engineering and Management students. This prestigious, highly acclaimed event has successfully been organised since 1994. Two qualification rounds are required to be selected for the TIMES Final. Before reaching this final stage, all the participants take part in a Local Qualification at their home university. This year’s Qualification took place in P3 Group’s headquarters in Aachen.
I applied without any experience in solving Case Studies. I did not know what exactly I should expect, but thanks to Local Group Aachen all participants had the possibility to acquire knowledge from more experienced students before event.
The Event started at the P3 headquarters at 8:30. I met my whole team in the bus when we were heading there. We were the first team to arrive and start, because ever team was scheduled to start at 30 minutes intervals. At first we were introduced to Dr. Heidelberger – one of the jury members. Then we were taken to one of the rooms (far from the others weglassen). Inside the room were all the things we needed– flipcharts, markers, notepads and even a tape. We received the 19 pages Case Study, which kept us entertained for entire four hours of the preparation phase. Analysing and calculating took us all the time, so there was no time for breaks during this phase and we barely made it. The hardest was writing all our ideas on the flip-chart; we assumed that we are going to make it at the end. Unfortunately there was not that much time left. Then we had a break, during which we tried to keep our minds calm while eating pizza. For the first time I saw the other three groups. Everyone was focused and more or less stressed. Then it was presentation time. Again my group was the first one. We had around 20 minutes for this and then the jury had 15 minutes for questions. Afterwards we were taken to the waiting room – the time was passing extremely slowly.
Then the four jury members had entered. All the participants gathered around them. Before the jury released the results, each of them gave us feedback: What was fine? What could be improved? It was very helpful and I am sure I will do better next time, because of the advice and my own experience. Finally, we were able to relax with a beer and pretzel and got to talk to the jury members on a more personal level. The Winners are going to the semi-finals in Ilmenau. I wish them all the best of luck to represent the Aachen well. To sum up: Awesome people, great experience, perfect organisation. One more time I would like to thank everyone, my competitors, winners and especially the organisers and jury:
Jakob Kretzinger
Felix Strehl
Jury:
Dr. Gero Heidelberger
Prof. Dr. Volker Stich
Univ. Prof. Dr. Peter Letmathe
Univ. Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. H.-J. Zimmermann
The final week eventually brings together the winning teams from each Semi Final to determine Europe’s“IEM Students of the Year”. Stay tuned, we may win it.
Gregory Jankowski
(Participant and ESTIEM LG Warsaw member)