Secretary General Mrs. Banu MÜDERRİSOĞLU issued a message on the first anniversary of her appointment in TÜRKAK.
Dear Conformity Assessment Bodies, Assessors and Technical Experts, Stakeholders and Colleagues,
In this troublesome period of the global pandemic, which has also provided the opportunity to leave a mark in history, we witness that the need for conformity assessment activities has become much more important and that strengthening the quality infrastructure has an increasing international impact.
Today, we have been facing constantly evolving activities in many fields such as industry, medicine, environment, agriculture, and trade. Therefore, adapting to this transformation will be one of the vital priorities of the coming period. It is no longer possible for us to understand the 21st century with the usual ways of doing a business in the 20th century, and to meet the needs in the fields of conformity assessment activities and accreditation. Therefore, as TURKAK, with an understanding that is not afraid of change and modernization based on digital transformation and aiming to increase the quality of human resources based on our needs, we are all somebody can do to realize the understanding of doing the business quickly and properly.
I would like to express that we are proud to take many important steps and to carry out projects that will shape the future of the Agency in the last year after we took over the flag of senior management in TURKAK to increase the power of our country in commercial and economic fields and to achieve the level it deserves in global competition.
Although our agency is experienced enough to celebrate its 20th anniversary, there are several areas open to improvement. In order to provide our agency with the progress required by the age and our region, we set to work by initiating structural transformation one after another.
Thanks to the close attention and follow-up of our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, we took successive steps towards solutions to fundamental issues. We have assumed the task with the invaluable trust and support of our Foreign Minister, Mr. Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, and the great contribution of our esteemed Chairman of the Board of Directors, Mr. Faruk Kaymakcı.
In the first week after our assumption of the task, we celebrated TURKAK’s 20th Anniversary with an event held in Antalya on November 1st, 2019 with the participation of twenty-seven foreign guests, including senior representatives of regional and international accreditation cooperations and Mr. Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. We also held the first meeting of the TURKAK Advisory Board on the same date.
In 2020, important developments have been experienced both globally, regionally and in terms of our country; also, we have experienced the effects of the pandemic and the uncertainties it brought in this year. These developments, which have been also observed in production and trade, have had a significant impact on the conformity assessment activities in which our agency has provided service. Despite all these developments, TURKAK continued the reorganization of the agency, digital transformation, and service investments without slowing down. With its national, regional, and international achievements, it kept pace with this rapid development this year.
Our agency works hard to fulfill its duty for achieving our country’s goal of becoming a global actor. TURKAK, which is an agency that produces international projects in the field of accreditation for more than 20 years, has international experience and successfully represents our country in the world.
Our agency’s international recognition has been successfully maintained through the Multilateral Agreement (MLA), Mutual Recognition Arrangement (MRA) and Multilateral Recognition Arrangement (MLA) signed with the European co-operation for Accreditation (EA), the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC), and the International Accreditation Forum (IAF).
On February 1st 2020, TURKAK successfully passed the re-evaluation process, which was performed within the scope of the Multilateral Agreement (MLA) signed between our agency and the European co-operation for Accreditation (EA), without any nonconformity for the first time in its history. Also, we attended the 34th OECD Good Laboratory Practices Working Group Meeting on 17 February 2020, in which the Assessment Report of TURKAK was discussed and no nonconformities were detected; finally, TURKAK has been accepted to the OECD Mutual Acceptance of Data (MAD) system. This development has contributed significantly to R&D activities carried out in our country, including vaccination studies on COVID-19.
TURKAK has taken an active role in the administrative positions and working groups in the works carried out under the umbrella of EA, ILAC, and IAF. We continued to work with organizations such as the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), the Interregional Standardization Association (BASB), Arab Accreditation Cooperation (ARAC), and the Gulf Accreditation Centre of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
We took a step towards strengthening our international cooperation by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Bulgarian Accreditation Service (BAS) in addition to those previously signed with the national accreditation agencies of the Central Asian, Balkan, Far Eastern, Middle Eastern, and African countries to support the accreditation bodies of these countries and to develop our cooperation. We have started negotiations with the Russian Federal Accreditation Service (RusAccreditation) and Azerbaijan Accreditation Centre (AZAK) for signing MoU.
While working hard for taking an active role in international activities, we also focused on the organization of our agency. We established the Corporate Communications Directorate to strengthen our communication and improve our representation power as required by our national and international responsibilities. Moreover, we have reconsidered the assignment mechanism to use the pool of experts in the most effective way by revealing the statistical data about the assignment of our assessment teams within the scope of the "Assessment, Training and Projects Accreditation Department", which was recently established. Within the scope of the IPA-II program, of which our agency is a beneficiary, we have accelerated the efforts to raise and develop awareness in various fields for which we provide service. We have come to the final stage of TUYEP, a process automation project that will implement the digital transformation required by the age and accelerate the accreditation processes with intensive work in TURKAK. We began to use the e-signature supported "BelgeNet" system to create, store, and report the certificates, documents, and correspondence of the agency in a secure environment.
During the COVID-19 pandemic that spread around the world, we set our policies for this period and shared them with the public by taking the necessary measures quickly immediately after the emergence of first cases in Turkey. Then, we informed all parties about our policies with the guidelines we put forward, and we continued our accreditation activities without any serious interruption by supporting our operations with "remote assessment" and "remote training" systems.
We have included our relevant stakeholders in our work on new accreditation fields such as AS 9100, ICAO CORSIA, ISO 27701, ISO 20000-1, and Biobanking and made significant improvements to increase the competitiveness of our Conformity Assessment Bodies in the regional and global arena and to establish the reliability of the services provided.
Within the scope of the Safe Tourism Program of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the organizations that assess the touristic facilities were selected from the competent organizations in the field of inspection and management systems certification accredited by TURKAK. Within the scope of the cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, TURKAK has played a key role in establishing the reliability of these activities.
We worked closely with the representatives of our Ministry and the leading associations of the industry, which are the stakeholders of our agency, and shared information in the fields of conformity assessment and accreditation.
We conducted online interviews to expand our pool of assessors/technical experts in fields needed by our agency, and we strengthened our agency with our new staff to provide service to our Conformity Assessment Bodies more quickly and in better quality.
As an agency that has adopted the principle of reliability and responsibility in all fields we have operated until today, we wish to maintain our values such as impartiality and reliability, expertise and competence, adherence to ethical values, innovation, information confidentiality, being result-oriented, cooperation with stakeholders, and international recognition within the framework of our reorganization works.
Our main priority has been to enable our agency to achieve greater goals by combining our national and international recognition, expertise, and know-how with technology since the day we assumed the task.
I would like to express my sincere thanks to our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who provided the greatest support in our works, our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, our Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, and our Chairman of the Board, Mr. Faruk Kaymakcı, our valuable employees, and all our stakeholders for their support.
Best regards,
G. Banu MÜDERRİSOĞLU
Secretary General
