Hector Fratty

DVN: Who are the main customers of Farba?
A.G.: Farba started production with a licence agreement from Cibié in 1979 as a local Turkish company, that’s why most of Farba’s customers are in Turkey: Renault, Toyota, Ford, Fiat/Tofa?, and some local vehicle producers such as Temsa, Otokar, and Karsan. Now Farba also have some customers in Europe: Daimler, VW, Seat, Škoda, and Renault. Today Farba are a growing company not only in Turkey but also in Europe.

DVN: How is your relationship with Valeo and Koito?
A.G.: We have a good and long relationship with Valeo and Koito who are number one and number two in the lighting world, in order to create more value for our customers. We want to keep and improve our relationships with Koito and Valeo.

DVN: I visited last year your company and was impressed by the involvement of the management in R&D development. What are the R&D targets for the future?
A.G.: For Turkey, our effort at being competitive with lean manufacturing will be over soon, and the new frontier of competitiveness will be product development. OEMs want to decrease the engineering costs. With LCC engineering, we have predicted that and we try to improve our capability.

Farba belong to Bayraktarlar group who acquired the Odelo group.

Odelo are leading rear lamp supplier for German OEMs. According to our new strategy, core engineering will be based in Germany and we will support them from Turkey as a leading cost-competitive country.

Together with Odelo we have defined top ten priorities in our strategy and one of them is “Innovation and Technology”, so we will continue to invest in R&D together with Odelo.

DVN: You established a new slogan “Lean Excellence”. What does it mean?
A.G.: To be successful, the organisation needs to establish an appropriate management framework. In 2004 the question was how Farba were going to satisfy the customers. We thought the best tool was Lean Manufacturing and in 2004 we started to implement that Toyota system.