Emre Uzer– Secretary General of Kastamonu Commodity Exchange and General Director of Wood and Forestry Products Company
Having heard about call for proposals of Competitive Sectors Programme, a teacher from Industrial Vocational High school and an engineer from Special Provincial Administration started to look for NGOs, which can perform a project application. However none of the NGOs were interested in this call; except Commodity Exchange Board Chairman Sedat İşeri Although this province is famous for its forestry products, no one really knows what should be done to construct such an integrated facility. They have learnt through consultations. This facility was built with great effort. In particular, Chairman of the Commodity Exchange Mr. Sedat İşeri and all members of the Executive Board made great effort. This project exists because it was taken care of. This facility became a great spark of a fire. Large-scale work can be done through clustering. Between 2013 – 2014, tenders for all project components were completed. However we faced a real problem to create assessment committees, as it was difficult to find engineers, knowing the processes, having proper foreign language skills and other qualified people from other disciplines working in public institutions. In February 2014, by the start of construction works, the implementation phase started. In 2016 the large part of the construction was completed. Technical assistance component begun with the installation of machinery and equipment. By the end of November 2017, the processes of all components of the project were completed. Under technical assistance component, 6 new operation identification sheet were prepared. Those, which were related to solar power and electric power production, were submitted to the related founding organisations. Other project proposals are ready to be submitted to a possible call of relevant fund providing organisation. The most critical point here is the timing between machine and equipment supply tenders and implementation processes depending on the project type. At the time of installation of machines and equipment, the formation of skeleton crew had great importance in terms of trainings and operation of the facility. With the support of short and long term experts employed under technical assistance, both operating staff and SMEs that use the facility had the opportunity to have training and coaching services on design with technical drawing, specific production support, quality management systems, etc. During this period they understood how they could use the facility. This is a common use facility. There are nearly thirty machines and equipment such as cutting line, drying, impregnation, panel presses, all of them ready to be used. Hence this facility developed a competition advantage between Small sized enterprises of this sector. There are two kinds of production. One of them is stock model and the other one is order model. Wood can be transformed into wooden planks, doorframes or table tops. Final products are not manufactured here. This is one of the rules. Regarding employment, there are 40 people working in our facility. However, our goal is to employ 60 people in one shift and 180 in three shifts. Of course, this means an increase in the employment rates which appears as an indicator of success. We, as the family of Kastamonu Commodity Exchange, stressing the fact that our team spirit, belief and dedication are the main factors of our success, we believe that projects of this nature will provide huge benefits to our cities and country. The opening ceremony of Kastamonu Common-Use Processing Facility for Industrial Forestry Products was held on July, 12, 2017. For detailed information about the project, you can visit www.kaswood.org.
