After 40 years with Techint Engineering & Construction, Guillermo Daniel Díaz highlights the growth possibilities offered by the company, as well as the passion for doing that is its trademark. A specialist in Equipment Management, today he shares some highlights from his vast experience.

“At Techint, the sky is the limit when it comes to development,” declares Guillermo Daniel Díaz, who specialized in the area of Equipment Management after joining the company in 1983 to carry out inventory work at the Machinery Park located in General Pacheco, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Guillermo celebrated his 40^th anniversary of work with Techint E&C last April, but when it came to sitting down to share how his career evolved, he preferred to wait and “put the icing on the cake”, as he put it, after successfully completing the President Néstor Kirchner Gas Pipeline (GPNK).

Before the GPNK, Guillermo was involved in the Pascua Lama mining project up in the San Juan mountain range, as well as the Crude Oil Pipeline (OCP, in Spanish), in Ecuador, and the construction of the GasAndes gas pipeline in Mendoza, among other of the company’s iconic works.

“An equipment manager has the job of ensuring that all the equipment required at a project receives the appropriate support and maintenance. This involves preparation, preventive maintenance, repairs of all kinds, various rounds of inspections, setting up workshops, organizing the personnel to run them, managing the maintenance team and any external services needed,” explains Guillermo.

Project experience

Guillermo joined the company in 1983 through a neighbor who was working at TEPAM. His first task was to carry out the inventory when the Machinery Park moved from Bernal to Pacheco, focused on the spare parts and materials warehouses.

However, staying on at the company was not an easy decision, since Guillermo had been preselected by the national Olympic Committee to row for Argentina in the 1983 Pan American Games held in Caracas in August that year. He faced the dilemma of having to decide between continuing to dedicate himself to rowing, which took up a lot of time and effort, or prioritizing his work within the company. “It was a really tough decision, but I tackled the challenge with the same commitment and passion that I’d put into rowing for the last six years,” he confesses.

Guillermo steadily worked his way up through various sectors of the company, until in 1987 he decided to dedicate himself completely to equipment management. “I’m very passionate about this,” he admits, and goes on to recount his first experience on the job with the GasAndes project, where he worked from late 1995 to 1997. “It was something else: one day we were in the upper regions of the mountains, surrounded by snow and the next, we were suffering from the desert heat of La Mora,” he remembers.

Between 2001 and 2003, Guillermo was involved in building the Crude Oil Pipeline in Ecuador, an emblematic project for the company as it had to build and lay 503 km of pipelines. A few years later, he worked on the Pascua Lama mining project developed on the Argentine-Chilean border, where Techint E&C provided engineering and construction services. “It was a major challenge because of the sheer size of the project, as well as the climatic extremes we encountered working so high up in the mountains. I was running a team of over 150 people, between the site and the Albardon yard,” he says.

In 2023, Guillermo was appointed Equipment Management Leader for the R1 and R2 stretches of the GPNK, and today he reflects that building the gas pipeline was probably the greatest challenge of his career, due to the magnitude of the project, the tight deadlines and the need to attract quality human resources.

Guillermo, who has additionally worked in neighboring countries such as Uruguay, Brazil and Chile, is also passionate about photography. He has over 10,000 photos that depict machines, landscapes and the people working on the projects in which he has participated. His photographs are a testament to over 2,600 km of pipelines (oil and gas pipelines as well as slurry) and three crossings of the Andes. They also record his six years working in the lunar landscapes high up in the San Juan mountain range, between the Veladero and Pascua Lama mines, as well as other industrial works.

“I’m very grateful to this company for all the growth opportunities I’ve had, the trust that its leaders have placed on me, and above all, the people with whom I’ve shared work, people who have enriched my store of knowledge on a daily basis and whose background and different cultures have taught me so much. This is integral to Techint's DNA, and although it may seem a bit of a cliché, I truly believe that the passion for doing is something that identifies us as a company," he highlights.

“In these last over-four decades, I’ve gone from recording movements on a Kardex and making stencil templates, to the first computers, the appearance of the fax—which was revolutionary at the time—to the latest generation laptops,” he states.

As a final reflection, he singles out the great value of the human capital working with the company. “I am proud to have worked alongside true heroes, for whom I feel deep gratitude and respect,” he concludes.