The automation and control company is part of the life project that its founder, Claudio Jara Beltrán, has been building since he was very young. In three decades, they have overcome all kinds of challenges, even reaching the international market. Today, they are preparing to take full advantage of artificial intelligence.
After nine years of working as a civil electrical engineer, in 1994 Claudio Jara Beltrán had accumulated enough professional and financial capital to start his own company. He looked for partners, but ultimately decided to embark alone on this life project, which he named Tunning Ingeniería. “I started out on the second floor of a house we shared with another company. At that time, there was no Internet, email, or cell phones,“ he recalls, remembering those analog days, ”and in the early years, we could all fit around a table for six people for corporate events,” he adds.
In his professional career, he had worked for the multinational Honeywell, a company that operates in the aerospace, building automation, industrial automation, and energy and sustainability solutions sectors. “First, I worked with Trumatic, its representative in Chile, and later directly with the corporation, which finally set up in our country,” he says. So, when he started his company, he began as a contractor for Honeywell itself, and then expanded to other brands. “At first, it’s very difficult to get industrial corporations to give you a chance,” he says.
They landed their first major contract with Huachipato in 1996. Later, they provided services to oil refineries, mining companies, ports, and other companies that entrusted them with highly technical contracts, which required training new professional teams.
In this way, Tuning Ingeniería grew to 200 employees. However, in 2015, they had financial problems that forced them to downsize to a minimum. “I was forced to sell the company building, my personal home, and my car,” he explains. They continued only with the process control systems unit.
When they began to get the conflict under control, he embarked on a period of intense meetings with clients. “I spent one week in Antofagasta visiting mining companies, another week in Atacama, another in Bíobío, and another in the Metropolitan Region.” Their efforts paid off, and business picked up until, in 2018, they obtained large contracts that allowed them to rebuild their cash flow and optimize their operations.
Claudio Jara Beltrán, electrical engineer and founder of Tunning Ingeniería.
Since then, they have consolidated a working model based on alliances with partners such as Rockwell, Siemens, and Schneider, as well as a work culture that projects them to the world from Chile, Peru, and the United States, contributing to the automation and control of processes in large industrial projects.
“After 30 years of adapting to technological changes, today we are faced with artificial intelligence, which is a whole new world. I am taking courses and studying everything I can because very important changes are coming. That is the main challenge,” concludes Claudio Jara.
