Your company has a continuity of 40 years in the fire protection and security sectors and you are personally the president of the Tüyak Foundation and Association, who performed duty between 2001 and 2006. If we go back to the beginning, Mr. Haluk, how did you meet the fire protection sector?
The incorporation of EEC dates back to 1982. Our company was established for the design and production of professional electronic testing devices. I took part in the organization as a small partner and Technical Manager. Our major partner was a group of leading companies with activities in the fields of electrical lighting, panel and installation material production and contracting of the period. With a large fire alarm system tender awarded to the contractor company, EEC was asked to produce the products to be used in this project. We became a manufacturer of fire alarm systems completely by chance. After being appointed as the General Manager in the same year and all shares of the company were transferred to me in 1988, we remained in the field of building weak current systems such as fire alarm, emergency lighting, security, pass control, CCTV in the fields of production and system integration. Today, all our group companies operate in this field, and the fire detection and alarm systems, being our first product, account for more than half of our business volume.
Your journey in the industry is also the journey of the industry from past to present. What stages has the fire safety sector undergone in our country, can you share your observations with us?
I can talk about three periods in which the fire safety sector has gone through different stages during my own period. From 1983 to 1988, when we started the production of fire detectors and fire control panels in EEC Electronics, the market in the sector consisted mainly of tenders for public buildings and private sector purchases for the facilities of several international industrial and tourism organizations. High customs duties of up to 40% kept this small market almost closed to foreigners for producers like us. There were very few foreign company representatives in the fire protection areas where production could not be made.
The second stage started with Turgut Özal's attempts to open the economy outside during his period as the Prime Minister. In this context, the reduction of customs duties and the incentives provided for tourism investments expanded the market from the last years of the 1980s and competition increased with the introduction of new foreign producers. During this period, which lasted until the early 2000s, the fire safety sector grew continuously even if gradually.
We saw the main growth in the sector in the third stage, which started with the Turkish Fire Protection Regulation published in 2002 and is still ongoing. We saw a very rapid growth with the implementation of the obligations imposed by the regulation and the acceleration given by the rapidly growing construction sector in the mid-2000s.
Today, I consider the market to still be an immature market. “Fire safety application company certification” and “third-party professional liability insurance” requirements, which are mandatory especially for the projects above a certain size in the European and US markets, are not even on the agenda for us. Even in the small Middle East countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, certified engineer employment and company certification are requested in this context, while in our country, company selection is mostly made with the lowest price criterion by competing with companies that are not the same competency, regardless of the nature of the job. The Regulation and Turkish Application Standard TS CEN/TS 54-14 are in force, but the commissioning and maintenance works of the systems are carried out in accordance with them in very few projects and facilities.
You graduated from the Electronic Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University. You started your business life as a design engineer. You started your own company in the following years. “Design” is often described as an area where we have some problems. What do you think about this matter?
We regard design engineering in two different ways in the fire protection sector. The first of them is R&D Engineering, which is one of the product development and production processes. The other is System Design Engineering, where application projects and fire response scenarios are concluded as a whole, starting with the risk identification for the implementation of fire protection systems in buildings and dealing with standard-based or performance-based approaches. I had the opportunity to engineer both of them.
R&D engineering is the reason why the majority of young people who study electronic engineering choose this profession. This was the case for me, too, and even before my graduation, in 1975, when I received an offer from a small company that produced electronic testers for medical devices and white appliance manufacturers, I agreed to work for a minimum wage of that time. This period until I started my military service in 1978 was an opportunity for me to gain great experience. The products we designed and successfully put into use also contributed greatly to the country's economy under the conditions at that time. Due to the embargo imposed on our country after the 1974 Cyprus intervention, the companies, which are still among the largest in the white appliances sector, could not import the test devices to perform intermediate control tests and final functional tests on production bands. Even the letters of credit opened by Turkish banks to foreign banks at that time were not accepted. The products we designed and produced without even seeing a commercial product brochure sometimes filled this gap, let alone seeing and reviewing a working device or accessing product specifications and user manuals. This period, in which I played a key role in their design and production, was perhaps the most pleasing and job-satisfying period of my life.
Today, production is ongoing in our group. I transferred my design and production engineering roles in EEC Elektronik, one of the leading and export champion companies of our country in the field of emergency lighting, to my partners and current General Manager Kevork Benlioğlu and R&D Manager Kazım Koçer in the late 1980s. They and my young engineer colleagues in their staff are continuing with success.
System Design Engineering is an engineering field that I have enjoyed for many years either directly or at the supervisor level. This engineering application, which requires knowledge of many different disciplines in the field of fire protection, requires a separate responsibility since it has been designed to ensure the safety of life and property. I am now mostly mentoring and consulting my young engineer colleagues in this field. I transferred the role of Chief Engineer in EEC Integrated Building Control Systems to my 28-year colleague and partner Hakan Sağlam.
In both forms, design engineering is carried out at a high level and quality in today's Turkey. Electronic R&D Engineering is increasingly software-weighted, and many innovative products take their place in domestic and foreign markets. System Design Engineering is also carried out and accepted by EEC and other leading companies of our sector in accordance with the international standards in large-scale projects in the country and abroad. If the incentives provided continue to be increased and the University/Industry cooperation is increased to even higher levels, much further progress will be made in the field of design with our young population and there will be great leaps in the productivity and competitiveness of our country.
The entire interview was published in TÜYAK Fire Engineering Journal.
