"Engineering is artwork" - Arief Koeswanto shares his technopreneur experiences

Arief Koeswanto, an alumnus from the Department of Chemical Engineering - Faculty of Engineering WMSCU, was awarded as the youngest Executive Professional Engineer (Insinyur Profesional Utama, IPU) by the Board of Chemical Engineering Division, The Institution of Engineers Indonesia (Persatuan Insinyur Indonesia) on 2020. Being able to combine the engineering with marketing skills to become a great technopreneur, Arief succeeds in giving the best design and construction results to his customers.

Focusing his work on pharmaceutical and biotechnology fields, Arief plays a significant role in upgrading the downstream production facility for Vaksin Merah Putih during the COVID-19 pandemic. He leads the Biotis’ team to obtain the Current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) certificate from National Food and Drug Agency (Badan Pengawas Obat dan Makanan, BPOM). Another project on biotechnology is developing a transfer system on animal vaccine, Erythropoietin / EPO, and plant tissue culture.

Beside the two fields, Arief also assists SKK Migas for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project. “My experience on foreign LNG projects, especially downstream, turns out can be used to optimize the LNG sector in Indonesia”, he said. He collaborates with other experts to develop the reliable and sustain concept.

Arief added that “engineering is an artwork and integration is key”. With these two qualities, we will have an engineer that is trained to understand unique phenomenon which results from interactions between chemistry, flows, energy; with the concerns from the scalability, economics, safety, and environment viewpoints.

Powerful abstraction we use in chemical engineering are networks (reaction, metabolic, and process)”, Arief concluded.