The Internet of Things, which is one of the most important technological developments in recent years, offers several benefits in an industrial sense. It is usually used in areas such as automatic tracking of production, creation of product information, productivity and performance tracking. Today, it has become a necessity for the business world not to fall behind the competition by closely following the new technologies that are developing extremely rapidly. Ozdisan Elektronik also follows these developments closely and offers the most technological products and services to its customers. Our Field Application Department is taking on a very active role in this regard. We talked about many topics from business processes to technological studies with Ibrahim Ekmekci, who is the manager of the department.
Ibrahim, can you please talk about yourself a bit?
I was born on July 25, 1989 in Eminonu, Istanbul. As an individual who met electronics in his childhood, I’m one of those lucky people who have been able to turn his hobby into a profession. I was accepted to Karadeniz Technical University, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, ranking 1441st in Türkiye. I graduated from the department I studied as an Honor student in the top 10, and achieved the title of Electrical and Electronics engineer.
How did you start your business life?
In 2014, at the end of my 3rd year at the University, my paths crossed with Ozdisan Elektronik due to my internship. After a successful internship, I started working as an R&D engineer at Ozdisan Elektronik in 2015 once I finished my school. After working as an R&D engineer for a while, I left the company due to my military service. After my military service, I started working as a Field Application department manager at Ozdisan Elektronik in order to be able to follow technological developments more closely, not to fall behind the digital age, and to offer fast and high-quality support to our customers. As a Field Application team, we are currently a team of 6 people, including 4 engineers at Ozdisan HQ, 1 in the Izmir office and 1 in the Ankara office.
What kind of activities are you doing with your team? Can you tell us about the business processes there?
As anyone who is directly or indirectly interested in electronics knows, Ozdisan Elektronik is a distributor of electronic materials. The main objective of all our departments at Ozdisan is to support material sales and bring the right material together with the right user. As the name suggests, we are a field team. Our goal is to manage and support operations in the field. Basically, we offer support to our customers in 3 different areas.
Our first task is to make suggestions for electronic materials to be used in new designs made by our customers. We are the representative of many companies in the electronics sector in the world who have a say in their field in Türkiye. We perfectly know the brands we represent. We often take trainings abroad about these brands. We inform our customers about the design, use, software and hardware of electronic materials that we are the representative of. We support our customers at the initial stage of the design and make suggestions on which product can be more effective and useful in this design. Our second task is to be able to create solutions against possible problems in the completed and finished products. We always stand behind the electronic materials that our customers use in their designs through us. If any problems are encountered in this process, we eliminate all possible errors by providing solutions together with our technical teams. We continue our efforts to ensure that our customers launch their designed products or projects to the market in the most useful and fastest way possible. Our third task is to follow the technology and bring them together with customers. We are a team that is intertwined with technology. As a field application team, we are neither an R&D staff nor a sales engineer. We want our customers to ask questions like “I want to do something like... So, what technologies should I use?”, “Which processor should I choose in my project?”, “Which wireless communication protocol should I choose ?” etc. and offer suggestions according to these questions. We are taking the pulse of technology by participating in the most important fairs in the world and acquiring new representative offices. We share all this information we have obtained with our customers. In fact, as the Field Application team, we are the secret R&D engineers of our customers who design products.
What other advantages does this cooperation bring?
The concepts of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 are among the leading technologies in recent years. As a team, we are working on the Internet of Things. We do not only recommend a product to our customer who wants to get information about a product, we also provide information about other products that can work with that product. This is what we call the ecosystem of the Internet of things. For instance, we want to offer all the IoT-based technological infrastructure of that product to our customer who wants to produce a coffee machine that can be controlled remotely, and we are introducing all our representative offices in this context.
After we define the product with our customer, we act as the customer's R&D during the entire process from the design stage to the creation of the final product. Whenever our customers need support, we offer service regardless of the city. After such services, we ensure a good communication with our customers. Satisfied with our achievements in the project and the work of our technical team in the background, our customers want to make their way together with Ozdisan Elektronik in their future works as well. We can classify the supply of electronic materials into two. The first is that the drawn board comes to Ozdisan Elektronik and is manufactured. Here, the material is already selected. We try to replace the selected materials with the products that we represent, by suggesting alternative products. Another scenario is that, as a Field Application team we choose materials suitable for the product to be designed by acting together with our customers when they are at the material selection stage.
There are very nice projects that we have completed recently as a Field Application team. The main reason for taking these projects is the technical competence of our team and the fact that it has the required experience to respond to every need of customers. When all of these criteria come together, a quality product that offers a price advantage at the same time emerges.
There are people who have done R&D engineering in our team as well. We know the path followed by the R&D staff very well. Today, we know very well what the customer pays attention to when a new board is designed. As all the electronics experts know, there are currently material and delivery problems in the sector. Unfortunately, it is no longer enough just to design a product. It is also necessary to know whether the product can be supplied or the designed product can be produced.
“We support our customers at the initial stage of the design and make suggestions on which product can be more effective and useful in this design.”
Technology is improving every day. So, what are you doing to keep up with this change?
As Ozdisan Elektronik, we attach great importance to education. When we are going to add a new employee to our company, in addition to his electronic knowledge, his enthusiasm for the work we do is an important criterion for us. One may be the most knowledgeable person in the world today, but unfortunately, we may remain ignorant tomorrow if we don’t follow technology closely. Working with people who are open to new information and new technologies is one of our priorities. There are several brands that we are responsible for in the context of the IoT ecosystem. In order to tell our customers about these brands, we need to have very good knowledge and perfectly know how to design with the brands’ products and how to make related software. Therefore, every time we make a new distributorship agreement, we assign a special staff to the company within our own structure. These staff participate in the trainings of the relevant company. These trainings can be abroad, domestic or online. In this way, we continue our work together with a team that is open to innovations by following the technology. We also transfer the information we have acquired to Ozdisan Elektronik staff, in the form of trainings held during the year.
How does Ozdisan.com benefit your business processes?
Ozdisan.com has a very important mission for the electronics sector. It is a library and the companies can easily identify and purchase the product they are looking for. The purpose of our e-commerce team is to add new products to ozdisan.com structure every day. We see that every day hundreds of new products meet with customers via ozdisan.com.
We make fast delivery in one day and ship our products to every corner of Türkiye without an additional shipping fee. Brands that are aware of this advantage prefer our e-commerce site rather than using international sites. During our customer visits, we can also get support from this platform when we talk about technical parameters.
Can you tell us about your short- and long-term plans?
Ozdisan Elektronik is celebrating its 41th year in electronics material supply. We are the largest supplier of electronic materials in Türkiye. We have the most experienced staff in power electronics. But we see that as time goes by new areas of expertise such as IoT, Industry 4.0, wearable technologies are emerging. As a Field Application team, we are trying to keep up with this digital transformation.
Due to the increasing use of smart vehicles, smart home systems and the Internet of Things, we can observe that there is a need for products that consume low power and occupy small places. As a Field Application team, we closely follow these developments and represent the best companies in the world. Together with our team, we are working harder every day to offer better service to our customers by creating the Internet of Things ecosystem.
There are several brands that we are responsible for as a field application team. At the beginning of the IoT ecosystem is our Taiwan-based microprocessor brand Nuvoton. The brain of an electronic board is a microprocessor. We are also working with Nuvoton, one of the best companies in the world. In addition, we have created a system that will support all wireless communications. We are the distributor of significant companies such as Cavli Wireless on the GSM module side, Nordic Semiconductor, which has no competitors in the world in Bluetooth, Ai-Thinker on the Wi-Fi side, and Linx Technologies on the antenna solutions side. Our main goal in establishing such an ecosystem is that our customers can access and use all electronic materials such as processors, communication modules and antenna solutions easily. All of our recent studies are on sensor technologies. We are working on systems based on detecting and commenting on things. We have an “ultrasonic sensors” agreement with American-based Maxbotix company, the largest company in its sector. We are working with a company that any company that tries to measure distance remotely applies to. We are also the representative of Honeywell company, which produces many sensor solutions for the medical, industrial, automatic and aviation industries.
While our short-term goal as the Field Application team is to offer better quality solutions to our customers by increasing the number of our representative offices, our long-term goal is to provide all the technological materials of a newly designed technological board.
So, do you pay fair visits?
We take care to participate in technological fairs every year. Of course, this has been disrupted a little due to the pandemic. There are some major fairs in the world related to our sector. One of them is the Embedded World fair held in Nuremberg. There are usually software and embedded systems at this fair. If there is no problem due to the pandemic, we will participate again next year. The other fair we attended is Electronica. Here, we meet with the world's largest companies and collaborate on what we can add to our organization and how we can serve these companies in Türkiye. We are also attending the CES fair held in Las Vegas, where the whole industry closely follows. It is possible to encounter all kinds of technologies from small household appliances to autonomous vehicles at this fair. Sensorsexpo fair, which is related to sensors, is also on our agenda. We have not participated in this fair yet, but we plan to participate in the future. Every new fair means a new perspective and a new representation for us. Therefore, fairs are of great importance to us.
