Teknokon Makina General Manager Mr. Serdar Ünsal

We conducted a pleasant interview with Teknokon Makina General Manager Serdar Ünsal, where we discussed the technologies the company uses, its targets for the coming years, and the advantages it will bring to the sector.

Could you tell our readers about yourself and your professional background?

Following my education at Istanbul Boys' High School and Istanbul Technical University's Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, I completed a master's degree in materials and manufacturing at the Istanbul Technical University Institute of Science. During this time, I began my career at the Turkish Industrial Development Bank, and after military service, I continued at Simko (now Siemens A.Ş.) where I served as a manager for an extended period. Among my important contributions were the establishment of R&D and the successful management of equipment development and export processes to Siemens Germany. Later, I served in senior management positions at the Turkish subsidiaries of German automotive supplier Webasto and German company Ytong. I have been working at Teknokon Makina for approximately eight years. Over a career spent in various industrial sectors and primarily on international projects and with foreign partners, the conclusion I have drawn from my experience is that, regardless of where in the world you work, achieving good results requires diligence, strong competitive drive, effective communication, and good human relations.

Could you tell us about Teknokon Makina's success story in the sector and the quality policy you have adopted?

Teknokon Makina was founded 26 years ago by four engineer partners. We carry out mechanical design and production of industrial process equipment, with a significant portion of our customers being leading engineering firms worldwide. We have a young, dynamic team with substantial experience. The distinctive features of our management are corporate approaches, customer focus, engineering understanding, and rapid response capability. We rank among Turkey's leading companies in the mechanical design and manufacturing of static process equipment. Between 2010 and 2012, we were ranked among the fastest-growing companies in our country. The greatest contribution to the continuity and stable growth we have demonstrated comes from our quality and customer-focused approaches. Of course, to compete on a global scale, quality is no longer a differentiating criterion. If your quality is insufficient, you are out of the game. Parallel to our ISO 9001 Quality, ISO 14001 Environmental Management, and OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety system certificates, we manage our business processes systematically. At our company, quality is understood as performance excellence at a level that will ensure full compliance with customer expectations; our goal is to achieve 100% customer satisfaction. We integrate quality service with customer-focused approaches and encourage more effective participation of our employees in processes. Our employees are the most important source of value we create. Good and rapid communication among our employees and the habit of acting in team spirit are the main factors that maintain our high work performance. In our business processes, we base our approach on continuous improvement and apply the principle of numerical target management. We place great importance on cooperation with our suppliers in order to develop our competitiveness and maintain quality stability.

What sectors do you serve?

Process equipment is needed in virtually all industrial sectors. However, the sectors we predominantly serve are chemicals, mining, food and beverages, oil and gas, energy, treatment, petrochemicals, and cosmetics.

What comprises your product portfolio? What criteria do you use in determining product variety?

We operate on a project basis. Therefore, each product we manufacture—that is, each process equipment—is designed and produced at our factory based on the data sheet and sample images provided by the customer. We do not have products sitting in inventory waiting to be sold. We can classify the product groups we manufacture as pressure tanks, atmospheric tanks and silos, reactors and agitated tanks, shell-and-tube heat exchangers, special-purpose process equipment, modular skids, and spooled pipe fabrication. Special-purpose process equipment is a very broad category, named according to its application in the process. It can have names such as converter, crystallizer, scrubber, thickener, chamber, fluid bed. The materials of the process equipment we manufacture generally consist of austenitic, duplex, and high alloy stainless steels as well as various types of carbon steel materials.

Could you tell us about your domestic and international sales activities? What are the factors that determine your sales activities?

Marketing and sales are perhaps the most critical part of our business process, as in any sector. Since we do not do series manufacturing, the excitement we feel when taking on a new project is replaced by the excitement of being able to secure the next job when the project is complete. We work predominantly with foreign customers. In the challenging process that begins with first meeting the customer, there are stages such as convincing the customer, the customer coming for preliminary inspection, requesting a quotation, preparing a quality and internationally competitive bid, and establishing good communication to win the business. Once the job is secured, quality production, on-time delivery, and good communication are critical factors for being able to continue getting work from the same customer. As in every business, trust is very important in customer relations. Trust comes from open and honest communication, punctuality, consistency and stability in business relationships, and proving these over the long term. This leads to the customer's long-term commitment to you—that is, customer loyalty—which is one of the most important factors enabling companies to remain viable. It is also of great importance that the customer be satisfied technically and in terms of quality both in the quotation phase and during project implementation once an order is placed. At this point, good communication between our colleagues working in engineering and design, project management, manufacturing, and quality groups and the customer is the fundamental element that brings success. In our factory, equipped with modern machinery and equipment, we have exported the products we manufacture to around 50 countries worldwide to date. It also brings us satisfaction that the process equipment we produce is installed in the facilities of important institutions in our country.

Could you tell us about the services you provide to your customers?

Apart from process design, we provide our customers with all services needed by an industrial facility. Process design is a subject that varies depending on the sector and final product; therefore, process design is not currently part of our scope of activities. We receive data such as data sheets, general appearance images, and P&IDs from the customer regarding the process. As Teknokon Makina, the areas in which we provide services in equipment manufacturing projects consist of mechanical engineering and design, project management, procurement, manufacturing, and quality control processes. If requested, we also provide third-party inspection services to our customers. Additionally, with our certifications, we also provide ASME U, S, R stamp and PED/CE marking certification services. Field assembly work for industrial facilities other than process equipment manufacturing is carried out on a turnkey basis by our company Teknokon Endüstri within the Teknokon Group. Maintenance and service are provided by another company within our group, Teknokon Servis ve Bakım.

What innovations do you plan to implement in the coming years? What advantages will these innovations bring to your company, your products, and your customers?

Since the sector we operate in is dominated by metal processing and welding technology, it involves technologies that could be considered classical. It is not an area where revolutionary technological developments are expected in the short term for this reason. However, to be competitive on a global scale—that is, to be able to produce internationally valid quality at the most competitive price—efficiency becomes very important in all business processes and manufacturing. In this context, we are updating our machinery park at the factory in line with technological developments. Although the nature of our work is generally not suited to automation, we place importance on converting some manually performed work to mechanical processes and developing new manufacturing methods. As part of this, we implement a 'Development Suggestions' system through which we evaluate the views of our colleagues working directly in manufacturing. Additionally, even though we are not a series manufacturing company, we are working on using proprietary ERP software for order opening and closing procedures to enable automatic input of manufacturing data into the system.