Can you introduce yourself?
This is Ilker Uludag, from TEKYAZ company, from Istanbul. We are one of the main SOLIDWORKS resellers in our market. And now also we are a SWOOD distributor for the Turkish market.
What is your role?
I am the CEO of TEKYAZ. But of course, I have a very long story. For more than 20 years, I started from the beginning in different roles, but now I am the CEO of TEKYAZ.
For how long have you been using SWOOD?
We have started the SWOOD business three years ago and it’s a very promising product for us. And now it is one of our priority solutions in our portfolio for our customers.
Why did you decide to add SWOOD to your portfolio?
Industry 4.0 is now very famous, and we were looking for complete solutions for our customers. Even if you are in different manufacturing industries, we figured out together with SWOOD, maybe it is the first time that we can approach their industry, which is the furniture industry, from design to manufacturing, a full solution, total solution, which is fully automatic. It creates a lot of passion in my spirit and I believe that together with the help of SWOOD, maybe the first industrial solution in our portfolio, we can promise Industry 4.0 full automation.
What did SWOOD bring to your catalogue?
You know if we were really having successful backgrounds in different manufacturing industries but together with SWOOD now we are very confident to visit even any demanding furniture customers. And also, you know, in markets we are very strong in Türkiye, the Turkish market for furniture. So together with SWOOD, it’s the key functionality for our portfolio to present ourselves as the best solution for this industry.
How was the SWOOD training process?
SWOOD solution has a very familiar interface because you know we are selling SOLIDWORKS for more than 20 years and SWOOD is something you integrated inside SOLIDWORKS.
So, with a very short training time, we can quickly adapt to the SWOOD system. Today we have dedicated three people just for SWOOD Design and I see that maybe they are the most powerful guys in our company. And in just one or two years of experience, we can fully ask for more customer needs.
What do you think about the SWOOD support?
We have many software in our portfolio and success always comes together with the support and passion of the vendor. And today SWOOD, I can say one of the best vendors we are working with. We are like a family. And so, any time where we need help, maybe sometimes for post processors, for some interesting requirements, requests coming from our customers, SWOOD is always there, the team is always ready not only to implement existing things but also, they are very active to enhance the software for all customer needs.
This makes us very happy, and our customers are happy. If all customers are happy, everybody’s happy.
What are the advantages of using SWOOD?
The biggest advantage: they can just go out and control the full process. So, this is something so unique in the market because it’s not so common to have solutions from design to manufacturing so you can touch every single point during the process. Without SWOOD, most of those companies, especially in the furniture market, must rely on working in different silos, there’s no integration and they don’t even recognize the bottlenecks during the process.
But when we introduce SWOOD technology on top of all other SOLIDWORKS technologies, then suddenly they recognize first time in their life there is a full process solution, and there are no bottlenecks. So now you can grow much faster.
Are you personally happy about it?
Yeah, we are very happy because this is something we want to copy for other markets.
This is the first time as a reseller we also feel very confident when we are talking about industrial automation, and about 4.0. This is the first time we feel it because Industry 4.0 is the vision that’s to come to that point.
Normally it’s not so easy, but when you see that you can make some changes to your furniture and then in your CNC machine everything is done without any problem. This is fantastic. You want to have this hope in all other industries, but they need to wait. But if you are in a furniture company, we can happily help you together with SWOOD technologies.
Do you want to add something?
Yes, we at TEKYAZ have 150 people and we are always looking for cutting-edge technologies.
And before SWOOD it was just an old vision, when we were talking about these integrations life will be much easier for the users and the efficiency will be much better for the business owners. And now today, I’m so happy that after these 20 years of my journey in this business today, I feel very confident in front of these furniture companies when I introduce these technologies and make them happen, making all these promises to our customer base. And so I thank SWOOD to give this power to us and help us to be game changers in this industry.
What do you think about the SWOOD Days?
Yeah, SWOOD Days. It helps you to feel the family effect because it’s not only us. There are many other passionate resellers all around the world for SWOOD. So, this is a very nice place. We meet face to face. It’s very powerful.
We meet other resellers, we meet even any technical people working in SWOOD and it’s a very good feeling to meet them the people that you get support from every day on the phone it empowers us and I feel so happy to be part of this family and I hope it will be a continuous event for the next year at SWOOD Days.