Industrial Digital Transformation Accelerates

INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ACCELERATING Digital transformation, whose impact has grown with the pandemic, is reshaping the industrial landscape. Artificial intelligence systems, offering advantages across numerous industrial areas, particularly in production efficiency, are receiving positive responses from Turkish manufacturers. Digital transformation achievements, enabled by Industry 4.0, are being integrated into manufacturing to form the foundation of Industry 5.0 through human-centered unmanned technologies. Manufacturers are recognizing that within growth-oriented development strategies, humans with intuition and problem-solving skills must be elevated to higher positions for more important tasks. This allows artificial intelligence technologies to ease human work and increase production efficiency. Özgün Yabalak, CEO of ZGN Otonom ve Robotik, which provides technological solutions in the industrial sector to global and domestic companies through autonomous systems it has developed, emphasizes that Turkish manufacturers are ready for digital transformation: "Turkish industry moved early by rapidly adopting the Industry 4.0 process. It has consistently maintained confidence that many long-standing burdensome and challenging processes seeking solutions could be resolved quickly and easily through Industry 4.0. The digital transformation process, the first phase of this transition, has started rapidly in Turkish industry. While digital transformation successes were initially frequently announced in high-turnover sectors such as energy and automotive, we can now clearly see that digital transformation is manifesting itself distinctly across all sectors. In particular, numerous domestic software solutions and multi-alternative hardware solutions make it quite easy to simplify many processes and operations, provide efficiency gains, and access these solutions." he said.

Demand for Autonomous Systems Growing in Turkey

Özgün Yabalak noted that the pandemic increased the importance of unmanned technologies in industry and showed that this transition was inevitable: "To be realistic, previous existing solutions before us implemented autonomy applications within a fairly limited scope in Turkey and found very restricted application opportunities in the sector. This situation, in particular, led to a biased approach across the sector toward autonomous vehicles. Over the past two years, as ZGN became active in autonomous vehicles, demonstrated itself, and conducted numerous applications in the sector, companies began to see ZGN's advanced autonomous operation solutions and this helped shift the situation in our favor. With the pandemic's impact, we clearly saw how important unmanned operations are, particularly for the manufacturing sector. When these two factors blend together, the window of opportunity for applying autonomous operation solutions in the sector has widened considerably. Nearly all trial, demonstration, and purchase inquiries began coming directly from potential customers in the sector and the timelines for completing processes shortened significantly. We can easily foresee that demand for autonomous operations in Turkey will grow at substantial rates in coming years."