Together, we experience that Covid-19 has radically changed many of our ingrained habits all over the world, especially in business life. The new era, which started with remote work, has introduced new norms such as return to work measures, new supply chain structure, different ways of doing business, and adaptation to changing customer expectations. In a time when digitalization has become more important than ever in order to adapt to the change, our top priority has become to ensure that the automotive industry comes out of this period with minimum damage. This seems possible if the automotive and information technologies sectors converge at the right time, at the right place, and in the right business areas, as able to and set forth new cooperation models.

At KoçSistem, our priority is to offer our customers the most accurate solutions and new technology-based business models in this period. In addition to changing our own way of doing business, we intend to provide benefits for our automotive sector customers with our products and services that will facilitate adaptation to the new era. We foresee the priority of transformation in automotive will be under 3 main headings: “Return to Workplace”, “Strong Operations” and “Changing Customer Demands”.

Returning to the workplace highlights practices such as establishing smart systems that monitor the social distance and sharing necessary information such as health status, etc. with the visitors online to minimize the risks in the work environment. In addition, the new era requires the use of digital tools that will ensure the coordination of employees on critical issues such as sharing accurate information within the company, making necessary warnings in a timely manner, and knowing health protocols by everyone. We provide this coordination by our internal communication application dubbed Workplace, which is also used by Koç Group Companies. Notably, our top management, the Human Resources Department and Marketing teams share all information through this channel, and our employees also contribute by sharing their information.

The priorities of many companies in this period include managing the changes in demand and introducing flexible production and distribution models. We believe that solutions such as Demand Forecasting, Stock and Logistics Optimization, Production Monitoring & Planning should be implemented quickly in order to create even stronger operations after the pandemic. Recently, we see similar trends in many of our customers that are leaders in their respective sectors.

Finally, we foresee the institutions that offer digital customer experience will stand out in parallel with the changing customer demands with the pandemic. Some of the very valuable digitalization initiatives in this era include solving certain problems with contactless video calls for technical support or gaining speed by answering your customers' questions through chatbots as much as possible.

The automotive industry has passed a major test in this challenging process and with the help of all such digitalization steps, we are confident that the industry will consolidate its position as the locomotive of the Turkish industry by taking the right actions as soon as possible.