ElektroPanel Grew with Confident Steps in the Air Conditioning Industry

Elektropanel Engineering, as its name suggests, is an experienced but young and highly dynamic organization that rises on a strong engineering infrastructure and has three partners, each of whom creates synergy by undertaking a critical mission. We listened to the successful milestones of the company's journey that started with the manufacturing of electrical panels, its goals and vision from its founder İlhan Yalav and his partner and Yildiz Technical University Electrical Engineering classmate Cüneyt Gültekin...

İlhan Yalav: “I am an electrical engineer, I first met the cooling industry.”

In 2003, I started my undergraduate education at Yıldız Technical University, Department of Electrical Engineering. I worked in different jobs while I was a student. I started working at Karsu Soğutma even before I finished my school. During the nearly three years I worked there, I learned about cooling and ventilation. The company from which we supplied the electrical panels used in the systems offered me a partnership in 2010, saying that they wanted to expand their business. Since my uncle was a successful businessman, I would take him as an example and consider starting my own business. When such an offer came, we established Fi Elektrik LLC. This is how we started working with Ersin Dinç, who is now our partner at Elektropanel. However, when I had some disagreements in principle with our other partner during the process, I left and founded ElektroPanel Engineering LLC. in early 2012. We started our commercial activities by doing work for various companies in the market, and we proved our worth in a short time by producing quality work. I visited the late Vural Eroğlu, whom I met while working at Karsu Soğutma company, and then we started working with Systemair company. When our experience in the cooling and ventilation sector comes together with our expertise in electrical panel production, ElektroPanel began to become the solution partner of successful projects in the HVAC Sector. In this process, Ersin Dinç also joined us, and our hand became stronger. Ersin Dinç was the second generation of the Dinç family in the electrical business, his father had a workshop. He learned the trade by apprenticeship with his father and when his father retired, he handed over the workshop to him. He currently manages the field teams at ElektroPanel, personally monitors the estimates and progress of the works, and manufacturing is also his responsibility.

ElektroPanel 2.0 Version Started

Now, in addition to electrical panel production, we have also started field installations and turnkey contracting, including software and automation. When the workshop in Topçular, where ElektroPanel started its operations, became unable to meet our growing business volume, we opened a second and even a third workshop, but our search for a better solution continued. While preserving the workshop with a closed area of 400 square meters in Topçular, we made a radical decision and moved to our current building with a closed area of 3,000 square meters in Şerifali. In fact, this move was not just a spatial change. Because we felt the need to review and renew our entire corporate identity in line with the expansion of the company's fields of activity and the foreign trade breakthrough that accelerated with the joining of Cüneyt Gültekin. The choice of our new building and our interior architecture approach are considered reflections of our renewed vision. I can say that we have started to implement ElektroPanel 2.0 version.

“Quality and honesty” is our red line

When I founded ElektroPanel, I decided that all our steps would be taken in line with two principles that cannot be compromised: Quality and honesty. We have based our distinctive competitive power on these two principles. For this reason, we are known as "a company that does its job in very good quality and can be trusted blindly" in the market with the works we have received and completed. Another preferability that makes us happy is that we successfully solve specific jobs that require quality and care. Reliability comes to the forefront more in jobs that are not, as the saying goes, "ordinary". It is now well known that we can handle such projects without any problems. If you do very good or very bad work, it is immediately heard and spread in this sector.

Customer satisfaction is our first goal...

For example, we made approximately one hundred station fan panels of the Istanbul new airport subway. The automation, end connections, on-site testing and commissioning of these panels are also within our scope of responsibility. Our teams are still working in this field. Our work here was highly appreciated by both the subcontractor and KKC, the main contractor. We are result-oriented; when there is a problem that does not originate from us, we do not say "it is none of our business" and turn our backs, we immediately focus on the solution and try to be part of the solution. In this way, our customers who work with us are satisfied and can choose us for their next project without hesitation. We look at our work the way an artist looks at his work, and we must first like what we do. Material quality should also satisfy us first.

We are proud of our references

We made the panels of ÇamlıkRiva and Selçuk Gazi tunnels, and the panels of the cooling towers of Ziraat Bank and VakıfBank in the Istanbul Finance Center. There are BMUs, that is, these building cleaning machines, in the building of the IFC Central Bank. The automatic park entry and exit automation of these BMUs also belongs to us.

Our panels are in service in Izmir, Gaziantep, Bursa, Kilis, Adana City Hospitals, Lütfi Kırdar and Süleyman Yalçın Hospitals. We have many turnkey references in Egypt, Libya, Kuwait and Qatar, where we sent our teams from here and carried out field assembly.

We took part in the modernization of cooling towers at the headquarters of the Air Forces Command, the former NATO base in Eskişehir. In such a project, you should never have the possibility of making a mistake. Knowing this, we worked very meticulously and under stress, but we were very happy with the results.

We have projects in Iraq, Oman, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Oman, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia, the assembly of which also belongs to us. We sent panels for a project in Germany, which was a very good experience for us. Germans work very meticulously. They sent us a return list that would fill two A4 pages about the boards that went before us, with errors. In the return report sent after our panel shipment, there was one line where the power of one fan was written in watts instead of kilowatts. This was a job we were proud of, "Even the Germans couldn't find any flaws"..

We make industrial dishwasher panels for a white goods factory. We have also taken on the cable grouping work here. We have made the necessary machinery investments. We send the panels to our customers ready to be "plug-and-play" with all cables and sockets.

Cüneyt Gültekin : “I graduated from Electrical Engineering and found myself in the field”

After graduating from Yıldız Technical University as an Electrical Engineer in 2010, I went to Libya. I started working in the construction sector, directly in the field, but after a while war broke out and we barely escaped with our lives. I was offered to work in Russia through the relations I established during this process, and the region I was going to work in was a harsh and very cold region in the north of Russia. When they said Yamata company, I thought it must be a Japanese company, but it was an abbreviation of the name of the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous region and the name of Ata Construction Company, which used to work in that region. I had to learn Russian there because it was not possible to communicate in English with the locals. Also, it was possible to work in important positions in this geography with a good command of Russian. After a year and a half, I agreed with Rönesans Group and came to the Moscow headquarters. I was in Russia until the end of 2020. At Yamata, I was mostly in design, but at Rönesans I was responsible for negotiations with the employer, progress payments, purchases, contracts with subcontractors. It was a very important experience-building period for me. When I joined ElektroPanel a year ago, this experience made me take many level steps in a shorter time with one move. Because we were aware that the level of "network" a company can reach is as important as how well it knows its business. We put the road map that could take the company to a brand new dimension on our table and set off on a brand new path with the energy of our youth. We identified new markets, new targets and shared new ambitions.

As a final word, we would like to say that ElektroPanel, with its new vision and goals, plans to obtain 30% of its turnover from foreign markets in the first stage and to become a dominant player in foreign markets in the future. We have learned that; "if you love and respect your work, success is yours..."