Six months ago, the Perficient team in Mexico contacted Tec Racing, the Formula SAE team at Monterrey Tec, to discuss a potential partnership as part of Perficient’s Electrifying the Future of Automotive Program. While the team was excited to partner, they were in the middle of a generational change. Their leaders were heading through their final semester and needed to focus on their assignments and graduation.
The Formula SAE team was unable to enter the competition this year, but Perficient was still enthusiastic about supporting the students in other ways. For three years now, Perficient Mexico has been collaborating with the computer science students in the Education Partners program. In this program, companies challenge students to build certain solutions either for the company or for another group. The challenge may be to solve a company problem, to build a POC, or to build a software component.
As part of this program in 2024, Perficient Mexico has collaborated with the school to build a solution for the Tec Racing team.
A Collaboration Tool Built for Speed
Our question to Tec Racing team was if they needed a software solution to help with their processes as part of the Formula SAE program. In response, the team asked Perficient for help putting together a tool that limits the problems caused by generations of students coming and going each year. The team needed a way to preserve the knowledge every student accumulates so that it could be referenced by students long after they had left the team. This tool would also need to help them collaborate as well as keep sponsors updated on their progress in building the car.
A new relationship between the Tec Racing team, the computer science students, and Perficient was born.
From this collaboration, six computer science teams worked on their solution proposal. The tools will allow Tec Racing students to have better control of their project’s documentation, to better track tasks, and to give sponsors visibility. As part of the program challenge, the team was required to work on version control, automated testing, and security practices. The project will allow Tec Racing students to collaborate among the group, but most importantly, they will be able to leave documentation for future generations.
Supporting the Next Generations of Computer Scientists and Engineers
Everyone understood that this was a multi-year collaboration. Based on best software development practices, Perficient not only helped to set the vision of the projects but also to lay the groundwork for several generations to work within this project.
On June 13th the students gave their presentation of those projects, and everybody felt that they had taken a huge step further in the right direction. With this new tool, the Tec Racing team is preparing the next generation of students which, hopefully, will build Monterrey Tec’s first Formula SAE car.
Explore Perficient’s Electrifying the Future of Automotive Program.
