Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey

At the conference, sessions were held on digital business services, e-commerce, innovative payment systems and open banking, digital marketing, cloud transformation of ERP, digitalization in HR processes and managed services in the focus of digital transformation of SMEs.

TOBB Board Member Selçuk Öztürk said at the opening of the conference that SMEs are a very important stakeholder of the national economy.

Pointing to the importance of SMEs’ competitiveness, efficiency and their ability to work together to achieve economies of scale, Öztürk said that the way to achieve this is through digitalization.

Öztürk pointed out that digitalization has become a necessity rather than a want, and reported that they are carrying out projects for the digitalization of SMEs.

Pointing out that SMEs that cannot realize their digital transformation are lagging behind in competition, Öztürk noted the following: “Businesses with a ready technological infrastructure were among the least affected by the pandemic with the help of e-commerce and remote working systems and digital payment channels. As TOBB, we intensified our work on the digitalization of SMEs and started to develop more projects. We launched the Smart SME Platform to be a solution to this problem. With this platform, we aimed to establish trust and communication between SMEs and technology suppliers under the TOBB logo. Under this platform, we bring together the two sides of digitalization.”

Stating that the Smart SME Platform can be considered as a digital store, Öztürk continued as follows: “Just as traditional stores display physical products and services and are visited by consumers, the Smart SME Platform displays digital products and services instead of physical products. Currently, more than 2,000 products and services from over 600 technology suppliers are actively displayed on the platform. Tens of thousands of SMEs visit the platform every month. With the work we have carried out in this context, we have accumulated a great deal of knowledge on the platform over the past 3 years. Now we have started our events like today to disseminate this knowledge. We are holding the second digital transformation event of Smart SME in Konya. We will continue with İzmir next month. With these events, we aim to bring together technology suppliers and SMEs that we have brought together in the digital environment with SMEs in the physical environment, thus helping your digital transformation even more.”

- Smart SME hosts over 2,000 products and services in more than 80 categories

Smart SME Executive Board Member Başar Ceylan emphasized that the Smart SME Platform was a first in Türkiye and said, “We brought together SMEs that want to digitalize in Türkiye in the B2B area and technology suppliers with products and services for digital transformation on a single platform. We are also very pleased to bring benefits to our SMEs together. In the past, when our SMEs needed a product and service for digitalization, they could access products and services from their spouses, friends, acquaintances, people they knew, and the internet. Thanks to Smart SME, they can comparatively examine more than 2,000 products and services in more than 80 categories, establish contact with companies and reach technology suppliers with other different product services that they do not know.”

Gürkan Arpacı, General Manager of Turkcell Digital Business Services, commented on the digitalization of SMEs in Konya: “SMEs in the region constitute an important power with their contribution to local economies as well as creating employment. Thanks to our sectoral expertise and strong infrastructure, we stand by our SMEs in their digitalization processes to ensure business continuity, increase their productivity and enable them to compete. I believe that successful projects will be realized together with the Smart SME Platform, which plays a unifying role in this ecosystem.”

Cahit Ceren, Director of SME Policies and Industry at TOBB, delivered a speech at the conference's session on digitalization trends for SMEs.