14th TTANNER college and university competition Tobias Albrecht, Lukas Ilse, Anne-Susann Linde and Devin Yu from Merseburg University of Applied Sciences won the 14th TANNER college and university competition for students of technical communication. The challenge was set by Jungheinrich Service & Parts AG & Co. KG, a wholly owned subsidiary of Jungheinrich AG. The meeting of the judging panel and competition’s awards ceremony was held on 18 June as an online event. Second place went to a team from TH Mittelhessen University.
Complex feedback system for different channels
Jungheinrich is one of the world’s leading solution providers for intralogistics. The company offers customers a comprehensive product portfolio of forklift trucks, racking systems and services. As part of its digitisation strategy, Jungheinrich wishes to intensify dialogue with product users and systematically establish feedback channels for this purpose. The students in the competition were tasked with developing various feedback scenarios and considering how these could be implemented in practice. The challenge revolved around the operating manual.
The judging panel was this year once again impressed by the high quality and creativity of all competition entries. “We didn’t make the final decision easily. All teams presented well thought-out and, above all, feasible concepts,” confirms Christian Dreyer, Head of Life Cycle Management Service at Jungheinrich. “In the end the students from Merseburg University were the most convincing, winning us over, on the one hand, with their very detailed feedback system of six modules, and on the other, through their strong involvement with the target group.”
Students from four different colleges and universities had taken up Jungheinrich’s challenge. The teams came from Merseburg University of Applied Sciences, TH Mittelhessen University of Applied Sciences, the South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Online event offers insight into competition entries
For the first time in 14 years the TANNER college and university competition could not be held as a face-to-face event due to the ongoing situation with Covid 19. “Cancelling the event was not an option for us,” comments TANNER board member Georg-Friedrich Blocher. “The students invested a lot of effort and creativity in their competition entries. We wanted to pay tribute to that without fail.” The university teams thus presented their entries to the expert judging panel in a public event held online for the first time. The panel was made up of representatives from Bosch Thermotechnik, Häfele, Jungheinrich, Karl Storz and TANNER.
Voting by the judging panel and the awards ceremony took place in the afternoon, also online, albeit not in public. The members of the panel praised the students’ confident handling of the alternative format for the event. Nevertheless, all participants are hoping that in 2021 the competition will take place in its usual setting and once again in person.