We had an enjoyable interview with General Manager of Teknokon Makina Mr. Serdar Ünsal about the technologies used by the company, their targets in the coming years and the advantages they will bring to the sector.
Could you please tell our readers about yourself and your professional background?
Following my education at
Istanbul Erkek High School and Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, I had a master’s degree in materials and manufacturing at the Institute of Science and Technology, Istanbul Technical University.
Meanwhile, I started working in the Industrial Development Bank of Turkey. After military service, I started working at Siemens Turkey and undertook various management positions in my long employment period there.
The establishment of Research and Development Department and successful management of the product development/ export processes for Siemens Germany are among my significant contributions.
Later, I was employed as general manager of Webasto Turkey, a German company in automotive industry and then in the top management of Ytong Turkey, a German based company producing construction materials. Now, I have been working at Teknokon Makina for about 8 years.
In my work experience in various sectors of the industry and mainly in overseas projects and partners, I found out that everyone in the world needs industriousness, high struggle power, effective communication and good human relations to achieve good business results.
Could you tell us about Teknokon Makina’s success in the sector and your quality policy?
Teknokon Machinery was founded 26 years ago by four engineer partners. We perform mechanical design and fabrication of industrial process equipment, and a significant part of our customers are the world’s leading engineering firms. We have a young and dynamic staff with extensive experience.
Institutional management processes, being customer oriented, having an engineering perception and quick reaction ability are the main features of our management. We are among the leading companies in the mechanical design and manufacturing of static process equipment in our country.
We have ranked as one of the fastest growing companies between 2010 and 2012. Our quality and customer-oriented approach is the main reason for our sustainability and continuous growth. Quality is no longer a criteria to compete on a global scale. If your quality is not sufficient, you are out of the game.
We systematically manage our business processes in line with the ISO 9001 Quality Management System, ISO 14001 Environmental Management System and OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System certificates that we have.
We perceive quality as performance superiority to ensure full compliance with customer expectations and our goal is to ensure 100% customer satisfaction. We integrate high quality service with customer-oriented approaches and encourage our employees to participate more effectively in the processes. The most important sources of the added value that we create are our employees, the efficient and fast communication between our employees, and the habit of acting with a team spirit is the main factor that keeps our work performance high.
Having our business processes based on a continuous improvement approach, we practice the principle of target management by quantitative objectives.
We also place great importance on the cooperation with our suppliers in order to improve our competitiveness and maintain the consistence of our quality.
What are the sectors you serve?
Process equipment are required in almost all industrial sectors. However, we serve mainly the chemical, mining, food&beverage, oil&gas, energy, refining, petrochemical and cosmetic sectors.
How is your product portfolio? What criteria do you consider when determining your product range?
We are a project-based working company. Therefore, every product, means process equipment, that we produce is designed based on the data sheet&guide drawings provided by the customer and fabricated in our factory. We do not have any product that we fabricate and keep in stock for sale.
We can classify our product groups as pressure vessels, atmospheric tanks and silos, reactors and mixing tanks, shell & tube type heat exchangers, special purpose process equipment, modular skids and pipe spools.
Special purpose process equipment is covering a wide range of products and they are named according to the purpose they serve within the process such as converter, crystallizer, scrubber, thickener, chamber, fluid bed.
The material types of the process equipment that we produce are generally austenitic, duplex and high alloy stainless steel and also include various types of carbon steel materials.
Could you tell us about your domestic and foreign sales activities? What are the factors that determine your sales activities?
Marketing and sales is perhaps the most critical part of our business process, similar to any other industrial sector. As we don’t have mass production, the excitement that we feel when we get a new order leaves its place to the excitement of getting another new order when the project comes to an end.
We work mainly with foreign customers. Starting with the first introduction with a new customer, there are different stages such as convincing the customer, customer’s audit, getting a request for a proposal, preparing a qualified and globally competitive offer and establishing a good communication for getting the job.
Once the job is awarded, good quality fabrication, on-time delivery and good communication are very important elements in order to receive continuous work from the same customer.
Like every other business, trust is a very important factor in customer relations. Trust is based on open & straight communication, being punctual, consistent and stable in business relations and also maintaining these in the long term.
This provides the customer’s long-term commitment, customer loyalty in other terms, which is one of the most important factors that help companies survive.
It is of great importance to satisfy the customer in terms of technical and quality both at the proposal stage as well as during project realization if purchase order is awarded.
At this point, maintaining good communication between our customers and our staff working in engineering/design, project management, fabrication and quality departments is the main factor that brings success.
We have exported our products to 50 countries all around the world from our factory which is equipped with modern machinery and equipment. It is also a pleasure for us that the process equipment we fabricate are also in use in the plants of leading companies of our country.
What services do you offer your customers?
We provide our customers all the services that an industrial facility needs, except process design.
Process design is a subject that varies according to the sector and the final product, so process design is currently not in our field of activity. We get process related documents such as data sheets, general arrangement drawings and P&ID from the customer.
The areas that we serve in an equipment fabrication project are mechanical engineering and design, project management, purchasing, manufacturing and quality control, packing and delivery worldwide.We also provide third party service on request and ASME U, S, R stamp and PED / CE Marking certification.
In addition to the process equipment fabrication ,Teknokon Industry ,one of our group companies, undertake turnkey site erection works of an industrial plant. Maintenance services for an industrial plant are provided by Teknokon Service and Maintenance, another group company.
Which innovations are you planning to implement in the coming years? Could you tell us about the advantages of these innovations to your company, your products and your customers?
The sector in which we are involved is mainly based on metal processing and welding technology and includes technologies that can be considered as classic. Therefore, revolutionary technological developments are not expected in a short period.
However, in order to be competitive globally, in other words, in order to produce the international quality at the most suitable price, efficiency in all business processes and manufacturing becomes very important.
In this context, we renew the machine park in our factory in line with technological developments. Although the type of our business is not generally suitable for automation, we attach importance to converting some manual works into mechanics and developing new manufacturing and assembling methods.
We also evaluate the opinions of our direct workers in the factory in terms of efficiency through our Improvement Suggestion system.
In addition, despite the fact that we are not a serial manufacturing company, we are working on making the internal order opening and closing operations with a unique ERP software in order to ensure that the production data is automatically transferred to the system.
