Textile Industry Digital Transformation Story | Timay Tempo Succeeded
About the Company
Founded in 1987 with the philosophy that “details matter,” Timay & Tempo is now Türkiye’s largest button manufacturer and one of the top five brands in its sector across Europe. Operating from modern facilities covering 29,200 m², the company serves 10 different industries with product groups including buttons, snaps, rivets, clickers, metal accessories, buckles, eyelets, zamak labels, and leather/jacron. Manufacturing across 16 different product categories, Timay & Tempo integrated its sustainable production approach with its corporate values and partnered with ProManage in 2013 to transform its strong production infrastructure into a data-driven, traceable, and manageable manufacturing environment.
Yasin Yenidünya
Reasons for Need
Timay & Tempo’s need for digitalization arose from the goal of managing its growing production volume in a more traceable, controlled, and efficient manner. The company aimed to ensure quality, reduce losses, and make production processes more transparent by monitoring shop-floor data in real time.
Key Needs Driving Digitalization:
- Global Traceability Standards: While working with leading global brands, minimizing the margin of error to zero and documenting production processes with full transparency became the company’s most critical requirements.
- Managing High-Volume Production: It became clear that monthly production of millions of units could not be managed sustainably through manual records or Excel spreadsheets.
- Reducing Shop-Floor Losses: The goal was to make production downtime, scrap, and efficiency losses visible, analyze them, and implement continuous improvements.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: The objective was to replace decisions based on personal estimates with a system driven by the interpretation of real-time data collected from the shop floor.
- Centralized Management: It was recognized that a production operation of this scale and complexity could not be managed effectively from a single point without digital systems.
Motivation for Choosing and Important Details
Timay & Tempo recognized through its initial shop-floor trials that digitalization could solve production challenges. However, to ensure this transformation would be sustainable, the company chose to move forward with a professional solution partner that was not dependent on individuals and had a proven track record in the industry.
- Technical Insight and Initial Trials: The first prototypes, developed using a computer engineering–based approach, demonstrated that collecting shop-floor data could contribute significantly to production processes.
- Person-Independent Sustainability: To avoid the risks associated with systems dependent on the knowledge of a single individual, the company preferred a corporate and sustainable infrastructure.
- Proven References and Industry Expertise: During the selection process, working with a professional solution partner that had proven itself in the industry and possessed strong references became one of the primary selection criteria.
- Strategic Investment and Management Approval: The tangible efficiency improvements achieved through the initial technical trials were presented to the board of directors, enabling digitalization to be evaluated not as an expense but as a strategic investment supporting the company’s growth.
- Scalable Infrastructure Requirement: The success of the initial trials demonstrated that the solution needed a robust and scalable infrastructure capable of being expanded across the entire production site.
Personal Experiences
The key experiences Timay & Tempo gained throughout its digital transformation journey are as follows:
- Overcoming Shop-Floor Resistance: During the transition to digital systems, employees initially perceived that they were being monitored, which created resistance in the early stages of the transformation.
- Communicating the Purpose of Change: Employee adoption was supported by clearly explaining that the purpose of the system was not to control people, but to improve production processes.
- Encouraging Participation Through Recognition: Recognizing and rewarding employees who entered accurate and timely data encouraged system adoption and fostered healthy competition among teams.
- Prioritizing Accurate Data Recording: For the digital transformation to progress successfully, consistently recording production data in an accurate and meaningful manner became a fundamental requirement.
- The Impact of Transparency on Corporate Culture: As production data became more visible, downtime, losses, and performance indicators could be monitored more effectively.
- The Importance of Management Commitment: Senior management’s ownership of the project played a decisive role in overcoming resistance on the shop floor and ensuring the transformation became permanent.
- A Shared-Benefit Approach: While the company improved operational efficiency through digitalization, employees also became more engaged through increased performance visibility, recognition, and reward mechanisms.
What ProManage Delivered
ProManage has delivered significant benefits to Timay & Tempo across multiple areas:
- Record Growth in Production Capacity: By reducing losses by 99% and eliminating shop-floor inefficiencies, monthly production capacity increased from 110 million to 190 million units without increasing the workforce.
- Rapid Return on Investment (ROI): Thanks to a well-planned digital transformation strategy, the ProManage investment paid for itself within 6 to 12 months.
- Preventing Overproduction and Excess Inventory: Real-time production monitoring combined with ERP integration eliminated overproduction, resulting in a direct 15% reduction in costs.
- Predictive Maintenance and Mold Management: Assigning a unique ID to each mold and monitoring its cycle count enables automatic alerts before failures occur, helping ensure uninterrupted production.
- Improved Customer Confidence and Faster Planning: The ability to simulate delivery schedules for large-volume orders within 30 minutes strengthened the company’s position as a trusted supplier to global brands.
- Autonomous Process Control and Continuous Improvement: Automatically generated production data enables immediate detection of master data errors while supporting continuous process improvement through mini Kaizen initiatives.
- A Transparent and Accountable Corporate Culture: Recording every second of production simplifies audits while creating a transparent, data-driven working environment for both blue-collar and white-collar employees.
- Operational Efficiency and Scalability: A 100-fold increase in revenue while the workforce increased only 10-fold clearly demonstrates the multiplier effect of digital transformation on operational efficiency.
Discover Digital Solutions
Tailored to Your Industry
