Can you tell about your company? In what fields does it run business? How big is it and what kind of structure does it have? What is the turnover and the number of the employees? What is your position within the sector?
SKF has been established in 1907 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Today, SKF has 45000 employees, it is present in 130 countries, has 108 manufacturing units and 10 mayor warehouses. Annual turnover in 2016 was 72,8 bnSEK (app. 7,3 bnEUR)
SKF is a market leader in the overall industrial market and has a clear leadership position in many important industries, for example railway and energy. In other industries the leadership position is shared.
SKF develops and manufactures a wide range of products for the industrial market including bearings, seals, lubrication systems, and condition monitoring. It also provides a wide range of services and solutions around the rotating shaft in the areas of machine health, reliability engineering and remanufacturing.
SKF is present in Turkey since 1928 and it is historically one of the oldest foreign companies in our country. We have five locations, two in İstanbul, one in Adana, Ankara and İzmir. To fulfill customer demands in shortest possible time, we have our local warehouse with more than 10.000 items on stock. We also have wide distribution network with more than 100 Authorized Distributor locations all around Turkey. To make the full global resources of SKF accessible to our customers, in İstanbul we’ve created a unique kind of factory – SKF Solution Factory which brings people, services and technologies together in order to deliver customer specific solutions.
Can you talk about your service solutions? What are the advantages of the solutions that your company offers? What are your engineering and consultancy services?
As SKF Turkey, we are providing our customers from any kind of sectors with a wide range of services. Our service solutions can be defined in two main scopes as at the customer’s site and in our facilities.
Bearing assembly and disassembly, shaft alignment and balance services, vibration analysis and reporting, thermal monitoring, root-cause analysis, lubrication program and asset management technical consultancy and training services that we provide at the customer’s site through our experienced service teams constitute a part of these activities.
In addition to our field services, in Solution Factory Turkey that has been operating in our country since 2010, we provide our customers with special engineering solutions through several products and services of ours. “Solution Factory” is a service unit, which SKF established globally in several countries and of which service capacity it expands by paying great attention for the purpose of becoming a solution and servicing partner of its customers. If we are to mention these activities under main titles, we provide service in the fields of spindle repair and revision, manufacturing special seal and sealing components, maintenance and refurbishment of railway bearings, calibration services, project-based manufacturing and modernization, balance services, hydraulic and mechanic equipments’ repair, maintenance of lubrication system products, damage analysis in bearings. We can say that in this facility, operation is in a sort of tailor-work manufacturing concept.
As SKF Turkey, we can provide our customers with fast and efficient solutions through our services that can complement our product portfolio in the best way possible, our global information network and implementation experiences. Today, reducing operational costs and performance increase are at the top of our customers’ expectations. As SKF, we offer long-term contract and collaboration to our customers with a new business model. With “SKF Rotating Equipment Performance” that is our global project, it can be said that we are not a company that only sells products. We aim to create value for our customers by making use of SKF technologies, services and solutions through long term collaboration contracts. With this new business model, we will provide our customers with the products and services that are to allow the bearings and accessories thereof, which is our main field of activity, to provide service in the highest performance and with the longest life. In the business model that we are to offer engineering support, remote and onsite diagnosis as well as periodic monitoring, mechanical services, remanufacturing and consultancy services as a whole, we will have provided our customers with the products in the scope through a sort of leasing. This way, we aim an increase in the production performance through product availability, long product cycle, efficiency increase, reduction in stock and workmanship costs and finally, improvement in our customers’ cash flow.
As known, with Industry 4.0, technological concepts such as performance, flexible production and optimization, systems automated or not requiring maintenance, selflearning processes and digitalization found place in the production facilities. As SKF, we are at the heart of Industry 4.0 industrial revolution, in all our technology platforms, particularly bearing with our products, services and new business models.
What kind of developments do you expect in the construction sector both at home and abroad?
Cement and construction sector in our country has been an ever growing and shining sector, thanks to urban transformation, infrastructure projects and the state’s policy supporting construction activities. Even through the new players and capacity increases are to increase the competition in the cement sector within the next few years, with the government’s decision to support the activities of the construction sector, there will be an increase in the domestic demand for cement within the next years. We believe that the cement sector will be attractive for investments.
Within the last 10 years, it is seen that the need for cement significantly increased in the Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries. Following that, production capacities started to orient towards the Middle Eastern and African countries.
We are more than happy with our achievements in 2017. We have been growing with double digit percentage and achieved and overcome all our goals.
How was 2017 for your company? How much did the sector and you grow?
During the 2017 we made SKF Turkey more customer-focused, innovative and strong. Everything starts with a customer requirement. We work hard to be easy to do business with and our employees take ownership of our customer’s satisfaction. To illustrate how we add value SKF has two strategically different value propositions. On the one hand SKF provides Products that meet the customer’s specific performance requirements, delivered at the requested time, at a competitive cost. Getting involved as early as possible in the customer’s development process ensures that they can take full advantage of improved performance and competitiveness. On the other hand, SKF provides additional solutions to help customers improve their Rotating Equipment Performance. Here the customers see the need to reduce operating costs.
Looking at the results, we are more than happy with our achievements in 2017. We have been growing with double digit percentage and achieved and overcome all our goals.
Cement sector and construction sector in Turkey grew by 5% and 6% respectively in 2016. For 2017, a growth by 5% is anticipated in both sectors. We can say that the cement and construction sectors will play a locomotive role in the industry within the following years, when the big public investments are to continue.
What are your goals for the next year?
Since I came to Turkey, I am encouraging all employees to become purposeful action takers and to take personal responsibility for developing the business within their direct control, having on mind our customers’ and SKF’s best interests. All this should be done in the line with SKF values & drivers and always applying the SKF Code of Conduct. This is something what we will continue to do develop during 2018.
Of course, our main goal is continuous growth and increase our market share in Turkey. In order to reach it we plan to strengthen our service business with performance based engineering and technology solutions. Furthermore we like to increase availability of our products, develop our authorized distributor partners and come with new market offers – proposed solution for specific industries.
What would help you grow the next year? What would you include in your agenda regarding investment?
Our main objective for 2018 is to increase our company’s market share in all product and service fields with a profitable growth, to develop our relationship with our customers and business partners and to create value for our customers with “win- win” principle. In this view, we plan to improve our service capabilities and variety for those offered in Solution Factory in particular. In addition to our machinery and equipment investments to improve our spindle repair center, we will also have investments to improve our root-cause analysis capacity in bearings. One of the important agenda items of ours is integration of the “Rotating Equipment Performance” business model and effectively explaining the remanufacturing concept in bearings that is a significant sub-heading of that model.
Furthermore, we also included locally establishing the SKF Maintenance Products promotion truck that we periodically brought to Turkey in order to increase awareness in bearing assembly and disassembly applications and to access our customers all around the country, in our schedule for 2018.
What are your products and services for the cement industry?
As SKF, we provide the manufacturer companies that manufacture machines and equipments for the cement sector and the cement production facilities that are the final users with several products and services, through our global organization and our establishment in Turkey. For sure, we provide the cement sector with service with sealing solutions, central lubrication systems, power transmission system products and service solutions and particularly bearing and accessories that constitute our main production area. We work together with the companies that are the worldwide producers in main equipment supply, in the designing and production stages of the machines. Thanks to our experienced sales and technical staff, we always visit the cement plants in our country and try to respond to the needs of the maintenance teams in the fastest and most efficient manner possible. We have numerous products and services to reduce the costs in planned and unplanned maintenance activities. For example with “speedy sleeve” wear rings that can solve in minutes the problem of wearing in the shaft seal surface of the hundreds of gearboxes used in cement facilities, reducing the purchasing cost and delivery periods by reusing the same bearing through remanufacturing service for large scale bearings, monitoring the machines via smart phones and tablets by using Bluetooth technology with our new product Quick Collect, seal manufacturing in special size from different materials up to 1000 mm-diameter, grease lubricants that ensure a high performance in the bearing housings of the equipments such as crushers and roller press, grid couplings used in the applications with high torque and vibration such as ID fan and filter fans and CARB series bearings that provide convenience in fan applications as well as many other products and service, we provide the cement sector with the highest level solutions.
What kind of studies do you conduct in terms of R&D and Sustainability?
SKF’s decision to make sustainability one of its strategic drivers stems from the belief that the company is responsible, not only for the economic results of its activities, but also for wider social and environmental impacts. We call it SKF Care and it defines the Group’s approach to sustainability with four dimensions: Business Care, Environmental Care, Employee Care and Community Care. These principles guide how the Group works and runs its operations.
Business Care is built on a clear and dedicated customer focus. Results should be achieved in accordance with the highest standards of ethical behavior. Employee Care assures a safe working environment and promotes the health, education and wellbeing of SKF’s employees. Environmental Care focuses on continually reducing the environmental impact from the Group’s operations, as well as actions to significantly improve customers’ environmental performance through the products, solutions and services that SKF supplies. Community Care defines the Group’s activities that make positive contributions to the communities in which it operates.
R&D expenditure in 2016, excluding developing IT solutions, amounted to over SEK 2 billion, equivalent to about 3% of annual sales. The key to application-driven innovation is to fully understand and design for customer needs. It also means bringing solutions to the market that really matter to the customers.
In some cases, SKF can meet these needs with catalogue products, while in other cases SKF needs to innovate solutions specifically targeted to the application. Needs differ between industries and customers
Can you tell about yourself? How long have you been working? How many hours do you work a day? What do you do in your free times? What kind of value do your hobbies bring to your life?
I am 53 years old. I have been working for SKF for 22 years. I worked in different positions in various countries. I don’t know how many hours I work a day. I think what is important is to work in an efficient way. In my opinion for this reason, it doesn’t matter how many hours you stay in the office a day, what matters, as I have said, is efficient work. I stay in the office for long hours from time to time for sure, however this is not a rule I have established. I came to Istanbul last year in March. I like Turkey and Istanbul so much. I enjoy your foods and cuisine. Istanbul is such an amazing city. We try to explore it with my wife and daughter. In Turkey, we feel like home.