theceomagazine.com The CEO Magazine - October 2015 77.

In The OfficeEXECUTIVE INTERVIEW

S ince the Otosan factory was established in Turkey’s capital of Istanbul in 1959, the automotive

manufacturing industry has grown year on year. Originally a Turkish steel supplier, TEMSA branched into bus and light truck manufacturing in 1984. Now, TEMSA sells its buses and trucks into 64 countries and has a capacity of 11,500 vehicles a year.

The issue at TEMSA, CEO Dincer Celik explains, was managing so many different products in different markets. “TEMSA makes more than one of type of bus. It produces long-distance coaches, intercity buses, midi buses, and city buses. Since all these different products are serving various markets, there is a lot of complexity to be managed. From 2008–2012, TEMSA had quite a bit of struggle with this complexity. After I joined the company, I saw the need to really manage this.”

Dincer was appointed as CEO of TEMSA three years ago, after

Turkey’s leading bus manufacturer TEMSA is expanding not only domestically but internationally as well, selling vehicles to more than 64 countries around the world.

Images courtesy of TEMSA

“It required a great energy not only from me but also from my colleagues to rediscover our capabilities in creating the right product portfolio, targeting to the right segments and the right markets.” - Dincer Celik

working for Kordsa Global since the start of his career. It was a big change for Dincer after spending 26 years at Kordsa. “I knew I was new to a very well-established industry, but I welcomed the change to work in this sector,” Dincer explains. “It’s a challenge for many executives or general managers, but I really wanted to take on this role. In the beginning, I spent quite some time looking at the industry, customers, suppliers, company metrics, and people’s capabilities. From there onwards I started to work on the right business model for TEMSA.

“I am also a technical person, so although I am not an automotive engineer I spent quite a time on product design, parts, components, modularisation, and creating commonalities between different buses and platforms. After these basics, I turned my face to market, customers, sales, and segments, and spent a lot of time with the team to create a workable and sustainable business plan focusing on products, quality improvement, and suppliers.”

Working with the management and the entire team already at TEMSA, Dincer was able to form a plan on how to take the company forward and make TEMSA stronger. “It required a great energy not only from me but also from my colleagues to rediscover our capabilities in creating the right product portfolio, targeting the right segments and the right markets. We worked very hard with the team to find out our new business roots.”

Dincer had a number of workshops with the team to build the right strategy and one outcome was to focus on supplier relationships, which are extremely important to TEMSA. Dincer and the company invest a lot of time in supplier relationships to maintain the quality of parts for its buses, which is crucial to their success. “TEMSA is a company which buys all components and all parts and pieces from their suppliers. We do not produce any single part at the company; we procure all the parts from our suppliers. Therefore, managing the supply chain is of great importance at TEMSA.

Behind theWheel

As featured in The CEO MagazineFor more info visit theceomagazine.com

Destination: SwitzerlandMercedes-Benz CLS CoupéIndividuality v. personalityBeating seasonal affective disorder

Top TED talksTransitioning to retirementInnovate to Collaborate

Medicover’s Fredrik Rågmark • Telecity’s John Hughes • Verizon Enterprise Solutions’ Pieter Holst

Joyce Mullen, Dell’s Vice President and General Manager of Global OEM Solutions, talks about embedding customisable

technology and accelerating businesses into tomorrow

R E A D Y

theceomagazine.com The CEO Magazine - October 2015 79.

“We work typically with more than 250 suppliers and about one-third of that is outside of Turkey. On the supply side, we work with reliable and well-known suppliers that are going to take TEMSA as a serious partner for their businesses in various parts of the world. To manage this we have a great logistics and quality team, who are 100-per-cent aligned with our procurement strategies.

“These key people travel and work with our suppliers at their plants to manage the quality, to manage the perfection of the parts, so that when parts arrive at the company they are 100-per-cent good quality and the number of rejects are zero. This works very well, and as of today, our first-quality rate is around 75 per cent—meaning that 75 per cent of the buses reach to the stock area with zero defect. As automation is very low in bus production, I think this is a great achievement.”

Two of the other big differences that Dincer attributes to the company’s success are TEMSA’s move to doing its own design at the start of the 2000s, and the increasing urbanisation in Turkey. “After 2001, TEMSA started to design buses with our own design house, with our own R&D facilities,” Dincer explains. “So that’s really made a big difference because early on our team were not doing much of the design.

“During the period of 2004–2013, we didn’t have a strong market position in Turkey but in the past two years we have become the bus market leader in Turkey. In Turkey there is good potential; we created a loyal customer base that we serve successfully.” Turkey is the second biggest bus manufacturing country in Europe after Sweden. Additionally, the Turkish bus market has always been in the top three in Europe. “There is a really very strong bus manufacturing industry in Turkey because of our population, because of our urbanisation rate. In Turkey, 75 per cent of the people are living in big cities. The urbanisation rate is very high compared to the rest of the

world, where in most places it is 50–55 per cent right now. This imposes a lot of challenges to the municipalities. We see ourselves as a good solution provider to them with our unique products and services.

“We’ve been the market leader during the past two and a half years. In Turkey we are selling around 2,000 vehicles a year and that is about three times of what we did 5–10 years ago. This year we are going to launch eight new products and six of them are for domestic markets. This is going to strengthen our position, our offerings. In the domestic market we are going to be a strong player; we really see some more growth in domestic markets with our new products.”

TEMSA aren’t just doing well domestically, but internationally as well. Due to recent war and political instability in the Middle East, the company has had to step back from those markets, but is doing well in other markets including the USA where TEMSA supplies buses to transport companies carrying Google and Facebook employees.

“For the export markets outside Turkey, in the early days, before the turmoil in Arabic countries,” Dincer explains, “We had a strong position in most of them like Syria, Egypt, most of the North-African countries. We had good sales in

these countries, but after this turmoil it is tough. On the positive side, we still have the right products for those markets, so when things normalise we will be a strong player again.

“We’ve had success in the US market, especially with our new midi coaches. In the USA, TEMSA is targeting the luxury midi coach segment. We replace a lot of cut away bus demand with our luxurious, comfortable midi coaches at a number of bus/coach operators.”

For the future, Dincer sees a lot of growth in the European markets, particularly in countries like Spain and Italy, where TEMSA is targeting the tourism segment. “In the West, we are growing mainly in France, England, Germany, Sweden, and some Balkan countries. We have the right products for those markets—especially with the intercity and for small distances, we have the right products at the right value. We also serve a number of different needs like the service industry, movable libraries, prison buses, low entry midi buses for small municipalities and some midi coaches for the tourism industry. Our present capabilities will open us to new markets in south Europe. We are successful in Turkey and I think we are going to be in those markets with our new midi coaches.”

“This year we are going to launch eight new products and six of them are for domestic markets. This is going to strengthen our position, our offerings.” - Dincer Celik

www.farhym.com

increase the quality of travel.