What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

One of the primary strategic goals in the sustainability efforts of Daikin Türkiye and Daikin Global is to attain a zero-carbon footprint. Daikin Global’s Fusion 25 strategy focuses primarily on themes aligned with this goal. To contribute, we, the Legal and Compliance team, have aimed to design a sustainable process to establish lasting values. Our vision in this regard is to ensure digital transformation in legal processes. Our mission is to minimise our company’s paper usage by implementing a digital system, thereby reducing environmental impact through decreased manpower and streamlined business processes.

To achieve this, the legal and compliance team has spearheaded a pioneering transformation project involving all stakeholders in our company’s air conditioning sector, including suppliers, dealers, distributors, and other team members, culminating in the development of digital contract management software.

Our project, the Daikin Legal Portal (DLP), operates by electronically signing and archiving all contract processes in which our company is involved. These processes undergo approval, which is automatically and digitally recorded. In this context, we have involved all our stakeholders in the digital transformation, providing them with legally registered emails and relevant infrastructure to electronically sign their contracts. As the Legal and Compliance team, we led the coordination of this project with our other relevant departments, oversaw the software of the portal, and managed the entire process.

We have been utilizing DLP across our departments without issue for over a year and a half, and the feedback has been very positive. DLP has significantly improved our management and approval processes, particularly due to its easy remote access. It is a great honour for my team and I to have played a direct role in the idea and production this project entirely in-house, contributing in a permanent way to our company. Therefore, our most significant recent achievement has been the creation and implementation of this project.

What strategic priorities are guiding you and your team in 2024?

Sustainability and digital transformation projects were our top priority over the past year. In the evolving post-pandemic world, we must assess all alternatives to face-to-face communication and include transformation dynamics into our processes. Beyond the classic risk prevention role of in-house lawyers, it is essential to leverage innovative digital solutions to accelerate processes. It is crucial to blend legal and ethical discipline with analytical thinking. This requires openness to different perspectives and mindsets as a lawyer, as well as alignment with technology. In this context, I believe our focus should be on solutions promoting operational excellence through strategic planning, enabling location independence, optimising time usage by minimising legal and ethical risks, and prioritising automation and digital processes.

As the Legal and Compliance team, we have always intended to incorporate these principles into the company culture and ongoing business processes. We recognise that eliminating the most significant issues experienced during our DLP Project and other operational processes involved comprehensive training and proper process monitoring. Transformation is a team effort that requires support and monitoring at all levels, and starting any process without the support of management carries the risk of failure. However, adapting across all levels of the company, especially in follow-up and unwavering target implementation, is key to success. With full support from management, our top priority in 2024 is expanding training and fully integrating our project to align with company culture.

Do you have a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about?

Thanks to our DLP software, all contract processes are automated, approved by relevant units according to hierarchy, and archived with electronic signatures and timestamps. Due to the success of our project, our software is now utilised in 69 subsidiaries within the Daikin Europe Group, to which we are affiliated. We see this project has significant benefits, including the creation of corporate memory, accelerated contract processes, enhanced measurement capabilities, reduced paper waste, and improved monitoring and control of processes post-contract preparation. I have been heavily involved in establishing contract processes for Daikin Group subsidiaries. Therefore, leading this project has been my most exciting recent endeavour.

Reflecting on this success, my primary goals is to produce and implement further projects that will contribute to our digital transformation. We have started working towards this goal with a project aimed at integrating a new module into our software for case management. This initiative will help digitally manage legal processes such as litigation, enforcement, mediation, and contract processes. Facilitating such transformation and witnessing its successful implementation is a great passion of mine. I hope such practices become common across companies, positively impacting the workflows of our legal colleagues as well as other departments.