(from top left) Nur Muhammad Adi Yahya, Asyifa Darin Asia, Titus Vanadio, (from bottom left) Bagas Paramarta Rofi’, and Henry Ageng Magrifan, who designed the Bantu.Id application

ITS Campus, ITS News– The magnitude of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is also felt by essential daily service providers because consumers are getting rarer, so their income is getting smaller. Paying attention to these conditions, five students from Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) designed an application called Bantu.Ind as a forum for providing daily service needs or daily service from small groups of people who are experts in their respective fields.

One of the team members, Nur Muhammad Adi Yahya, explained that this application departed from the case of the community’s essential expertise being wasted due to the pandemic. So that the Bantu.Ind application is designed to solve these problems by providing daily services. “Such as massage services, cleaning service, home, appliance, and electronic repair, vehicle repair and treatment, beauty, and plumbing,” he said.

The five students of the Industrial Mechanical Engineering Department had previously researched and surveyed the urgency of their design application. So far, more than 90 percent of 78 respondents with an age range of 15 – 45 years think that an application with a concept like Bantu.Ind will be applicable.

Although there are several similar service provider applications, Bantu.Ind is an application that does not double in other fields, such as several existing applications. So Bantu.Ind is special to cover daily services with complete partners. “It can be said that most of the daily necessities needed can be ordered at Bantu.Ind,” said the student, who is usually called Adi.

Various kinds of features are found in the Bantu.Ind application, designed by the ITS student team

Furthermore, according to Adi, because the target market for the Bantu.Ind application is a group of people who like to order services online, Bantu.Ind also provides five features that can help users. The five features are Profile, Online Booking, Categories, Chat, and Transaction.

On the other hand, partners as service providers can also register by selecting partner options on the first page of the application after installing Bantu.Ind. After that, partners can choose the category of services provided and fill out the required form and requirements. Furthermore, partners only wait for an answer from the application via Whatsapp or e-mail. “Finally, partners are directed to the interview stage, which then, if they pass, the partner officially becomes a partner of Bantu.Ind,” repeated Adi.

Users will first see the rates set by partners in terms of the transaction mechanism between users and partners. If the user wants to change the service rate set, then the user can discuss with partners about this. “With this flow, it is hoped that a fair agreement can be made and benefit both parties,” he added.

Display of several Bantu.Ind application pages designed by the ITS student team

As for the meaning of the name Bantu.Ind, which, when broken down there, are two words. Namely, Bantu, which means to help, and Ind, which means Indonesia. So literally, this application means ‘Helping Indonesia.’ It is also in line with to design of the application, which is to help the income of the Indonesian working community during the pandemic.

Adi admits that Bantu.Ind still needs a lot of further development. It includes applications still at the prototype stage, so programming simulations are required to prove they can function correctly. “We are still exploring how to develop Bantu.Ind in terms of coding because of the lack of expertise,” said Adi.

Finally, Adi added that he and his colleagues, namely Bagas Paramarta Rofi’, Asyifa Darin Asia, Titus Vanadio, and Henry Ageng Magrifan, prepared a prototype for this Bantu.Ind application for less than two months. In addition, through the innovation of the Bantu.Ind application, this student team has also managed to get 2nd place in the International Youth Business Competition 2022 organized by the Indonesian Young Scientist Association (IYSA). (ITS Public Relation)

Reporter: Gandhi Kesuma