Our General Manager Mehmet Apak answered questions about the purchasing and supply chain management industry in the E-Commerce Roadmap supplement, specially prepared for the March issue of Fortune Turkey magazine.
Apak, in addition to sharing ZerOnline’s structure and future goals in his interview, conveyed Zer’s unique business model and its investments in technological solutions, and said, “Our biggest goal in the coming period is to situate ZerOnline as the leading B2B catalog of Turkey, considering its rich product range and functional structure in indirect material purchases. With the customer and supplier cooperation portal that we will launch as Zer in the near future, we aim to increase the efficiency in purchasing processes carried out through ZerOnline and strengthen the communication via the user-friendly screens we will introduce.”
“Zer, like all companies, spent the year 2020 under the shadow of the pandemic, struggling with extraordinary conditions” said our General Manager, “but despite all adverse challenges encountered, we realized the budget planned for 2020”, he added. Emphasizing that many companies from both local and global markets were in search of a digital platform for their purchasing operations that cannot be sustained anymore in traditional methods under pandemic conditions, Apak mentioned that we have experienced a significant increase in new customer demands in Promena and ZerOnline, and expressed that users have been created for more than 400 companies in ZerOnline, whereas customer demand for Promena has increased by 40 percent compared to last year.
On the question of trends in the purchasing and supply chain management industry and how Zer meets these trends, Apak stated that the number of companies that want to benefit from the expertise of strategic purchasing was increasing day by day, and stressed that online marketplaces that enable reaching alternative suppliers and increasing the rate of earnings with cost management have become the rising stars of purchasing and supply chain management. He shared that the impact of digital transformation was also felt in the purchasing and supply chain, and that companies made serious investments to digitize both their operational and strategic purchasing processes. Stating that the rise in e-commerce due to pandemic was also reflected itself in the companies, Apak said, “We observe that companies make many of their indirect purchases through online channels. This trend shows that we can meet the increasing need by putting ZerOnline, which carries the indirect material supply to digital, into operation and we think that we can develop solutions in different categories in B2B e-commerce with the experience we have gained from ZerOnline.”
