Challenges
- Creating awareness and understanding of new processes
- Managing data from a variety of sources and scaling it globally
- Building a culture of digital transformation within Tofaş
About the Company
Turkey’s trailblazing automotive manufacturer, Tofaş was founded in 1968. 24.3% of Tofaş’s shares are traded on Borsa Istanbul and are included in both the BIST 30 and the BIST 100 indexes; control of the remaining shares is divided equally between Koç Holding Stellantis.
Tofaş’s production capacity, export performance, R&D competencies, and workforce of nearly six thousand people make it one of Turkey’s leading industrial concerns. Headquartered in Istanbul, Tofaş’s production operations are carried out in Bursa at a plant with 350 thousand square meter of enclosed space situated on nearly 1 million square meter of grounds.
As one of Stellantis’s important manufacturing and R&D centers, Tofaş creates added value for Turkey’s economy, industry, and R&D know-how. Today, with its knowledge and competencies to develop complete vehicles from scratch, Tofaş R&D Center, takes part in the product development processes of different models within Stellantis, in addition to the models produced at the Tofaş Factory.
Tofaş’s plant produces Fiat Fiorinos as well as the Fiat Egea family’s sedan, hatchback, station wagon, cross and cross wagon models. Tofaş exports more than half of the vehicles it produces to different countries in the world. Committed to being a leading player in all segments of its home market in line with customer expectations, Tofaş offers a broad portfolio of brands and products that include six brands (Fiat, Fiat Professional, Alfa Romeo, Jeep®, Maserati, Ferrari) in Turkey.
Early Results
A major part of Tofaş’ digital transformation journey involved connecting multiple assembly lines with workstations across the manufacturing plant floor. Using integrations with third-party systems, Tofaş could seamlessly classify and store information coming from thousands of data points in real time.
By implementing ThingWorx, Tofaş cut its project completion time down considerably, enabling significant productivity and efficiency boosts. ThingWorx also enabled Tofaş the ability to customize special projects, including the Tofaş Factory General Facilities Directorate. Using ThingWorx, weather forecast data provided by external web services were integrated into the model and updated every 30 minutes to estimate the amount of heat required by each of the buildings. With these upgrades, Tofaş optimized energy consumption and the project was extended to additional sites.
When it comes to company culture and adoption of digital transformation, Tofaş has seen a sharp increase in employee engagement. Before ThingWorx, only 5-10% of employees were involved in digital projects. Now, over half of the company’s employees are engaged with the platform.
Results
- 15% reduction in maintenance costs with the help of predictive maintenance applications
- 7% decrease in energy use through optimization and analytics projects
- 12% boost in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) by Quality Parameters Optimization, error prediction, and process optimization projects
- 23% less scrap
- 60% reduction in safety incidents
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