Latro Kimya R&D Center: Wonderlab

Latro Kimya R&D Center: Wonderlab Latro Kimya's valued R&D experts Sabiha Seda Serttaş, Deniz Özge Çolak and Eda Kamertay Kurttay described the features of Wonderlab, the company's R&D center, and provided information about the projects they have completed and are currently working on. [caption id="attachment_156900" align="aligncenter"] From left to right: Deniz Özge Çolak, Sabiha Seda Serttaş and Eda Kamertay Kurttay[/caption]

Could you provide information about when your R&D center began operations, its technical specifications and the number of researchers working at this center?

Sabiha Seda Serttaş: Latro Kimya began operations in 2009 by acquiring the textile distribution rights for one of the world's three largest silicone producers. Unlike other distributors, Latro Kimya wanted to reach customers through technical expertise and technical support. Seeing the benefits obtained through these technical capabilities, we established a laboratory called Wonderlab in 2016 to further strengthen this capability. When naming our laboratory, we wanted it to be a name that would make a difference, create curiosity, and make us feel our emotions, and we decided on the name Wonderlab. Our laboratory was registered as an R&D center by the Ministry of Technology and Industry in April 2021. We have the unique distinction of being the first company in Turkey to be both a distributor and hold the title of R&D center. At Latro Kimya, we do not make a distinction between colleagues working in the laboratory or working in the field. All employees in our R&D center continue to work both as laboratory and field workers. Along with field work, we ask questions about what our customers and partners need and want, and then we create projects together. For us, R&D is not just laboratory work, but also encompasses a collective working approach. Our colleagues working in the laboratory produce solutions to customer problems by drawing inspiration from the field and manage projects together with our business partners. We spend our time in a planned manner to understand needs and develop solutions. At this point, I would like to mention our core value of "exploration." At Latro Kimya, each employee receives the title of explorer. Of our 45 explorers in total, 23 are in our R&D center. Using our exploration value, we create innovations by combining problems and solutions. Beyond our main sectors of textiles, cosmetics, agriculture and electronics, we conduct multifaceted work as we also serve different industrial sectors such as defense and food. While providing various solutions in our areas of core expertise, we improve ourselves every day to gain expertise in different fields. Our work has a multidisciplinary structure and this also guides us toward our goal of creating new possibilities through extraordinary chemical solutions. We also serve as a bridge to projects developed in industry and universities and projects of our stakeholders. For this reason, consultants whose technical support and industry knowledge we benefit from are also part of our ecosystem.

Could you provide information about how your R&D center operates? What stages does an R&D project go through from the idea phase to completion?

Sabiha Seda Serttaş: We call this process "the birth of an idea." We can see this birth in several different ways. We can summarize these as listening to the customer's need, discovering a problem that the customer has not noticed, seeing needs that we identify during the process and communicating this to the customer. First, we try to fully understand our stakeholder's need and grasp the impact they want to create. At this stage, we examine a few topics to understand whether the project is feasible. First, we conduct market analysis and evaluate the customer's needs and the measurability of the idea. We also seek answers to questions such as cost-benefit analysis. Actually, the birth of an idea is not as systematic as the implementation phase of the idea. The value, importance and awareness of an idea begins with gaining and creating awareness by using our technical expertise. Because an idea can arise from a need, but it also includes processes that we may not understand the need for and must discover. Our expertise continues on its path by making these ideas meaningful and with our instinct to serve our stakeholders. After our ideas come together, we enrich our ideas through both inter-team and interdisciplinary work so that the ideas can develop and reach their best form. Then our teams, which we call "Hubs," create a plan and business model for the project and prepare a project schedule. By conducting time and cost analysis required for the project, we launch our project using lean six sigma methodology. Six sigma consists of five main stages: define, measure, analyze, improve and control. This system shows how statistically close we are to results in projects and how quickly we can reach the data we are targeting. By converting evaluations into statistical data measurement analysis, we transform opinion-based assessments into numerical data. In this way, we can better analyze the data. Since we start our projects with our stakeholders, we work with them during this process and implement our improvements faster. At the completion stage, we must think of the customer side as our first checkpoint. After determining the required outputs, we also carry out work on how this can be more sustainable and which stakeholders we can reach. By utilizing current technological advances, we integrate applications that will accelerate project monitoring and communication in our collective working system. Additionally, we conduct brainstorming by tracking current scientific developments together with our academic partners. At the completion stage of our projects, we track the control points to obtain results in line with the expectations we have determined with our partners. With the results we obtained, after providing the desired outputs, we complete the project and begin work to reach more individuals and businesses. In addition, reaching goals such as presentations, publications and patent applications that increase our intellectual capital is another objective of ours. This point is an important stage for the successful completion of our project. One of the most important requirements of an R&D center is intellectual capital. After making applications such as publications, presentations, utility models and patents based on this project result, the project is completed for us.

Could you provide information about studies you have completed at your R&D center and projects you are currently working on?

Deniz Özge Çolak: Due to our R&D center's collective working structure, we conduct studies for different sectors. I would like to mention some of the work we have completed and some of the projects we are currently working on. In the cosmetics field, our research continues on hybrid formulations that can combine skin care effects and colored cosmetics appearance in the same product. Through this work, we included a start-up in our ecosystem that produced Turkey's first domestic marine collagen production. Like this, we are always looking for investment in start-up companies with the aim of increasing our technical knowledge accumulation. We believe that through mutual know-how transfer, we can reach future technologies faster and we are developing a business model that will create mutual value. We developed products that enable the efficient use of our natural resources and maximize the yield that our farmers will obtain from the land. We started a brand creation process in this area. We protected our intellectual and industrial rights with a patent. In the defense industry, parallel to the positive developments experienced in our country, we partner with leading defense industry companies on valuable projects within the framework of confidentiality agreements. In the textile sector, together with project partners, we are developing solutions aimed at reducing energy costs in dyehouses. In the foundry sector, our work continues aimed at nativizing products imported from abroad through domestic production and contributing to gross domestic product. Additionally, our work continues on the TÜBİTAK-supported project "Development of Sustainable Solutions for Dispersive Dyeing Post-Processes and Waste Water." Finally, we are conducting joint work with international public sources and industry companies to develop antibacterial packaging using bio-based, low-carbon footprint polymers. With this work, we applied for a European Union project and we are waiting eagerly.

In the coming periods, in which areas and what kind of work do you plan to do?

Eda Kamertay Kurttay: We are on a journey of rapid change and transformation not only in chemistry but in every field of science. From artificial intelligence to the green agreement, it is clear that we will be pioneers of innovation in many areas. Adapting quickly and correctly to the changing world plays a major role in companies being sustainable and able to grow. In this direction, we have exciting projects that we plan to implement in future periods based on both people, the environment and science. We can divide these projects into medium-term and long-term in our future work. Among what we will do in the medium term, the most important is textiles. After all, there is a sense of responsibility that comes with being in a company built on textiles. As you know, the textile sector has a very large volume in energy, water and chemical consumption. The European Union took good measures in this regard. As Turkey and as a chemical company, we need to take some responsibilities. For this reason, we have a project related to developing hydrogen peroxide activation catalyst and system for cotton bleaching at low temperatures, focusing on both the chemical and water consumption used in this field. On the other hand, when you consider agriculture, the food sector and the climate crisis, it is a very important sector for both Turkey and the world. The agricultural sector will become a sector where we need to focus on the consumption of surfactant chemicals, soil health and bio-based solutions. For this reason, bio-based and sustainable projects have been initiated, and their research and infrastructure have been established. These are among our medium and long-term projects. At the same time, we have a dream of producing high-value-added crops and creating exemplary agricultural models for producers in this direction. Sustainable agricultural technology will contain the largest investments in the near future. For this reason, we have started collaborations with our references on our own agricultural model. The collagen sector is a product that is more synthesized on the cattle side and in powder form, and is a product group that you can see everywhere in the world, both in food and cosmetics. We are continuing formulation work to adapt our liquid form obtained from domestic sources to replace imported collagen in the cosmetics market. We incorporated this very nicely into our organization through a start-up, in a different form, and we are trying to adapt it to different companies. We can say this is both a nativized product and a form that has been done for the first time in the world, a new-generation collagen synthesis. We had planned this for the medium term, and we have now succeeded, and in the long term we are working to integrate it into different applications and different productions. We hold the patent on this idea. Within the scope of this project, we have a new-generation project by working on both nativization and the ease of application and adaptation of the collagen currently in use. Our goal is to provide import substitution, prevent foreign exchange loss from our country and increase our exports. The fundamental focus of our projects will be solutions. These are the projects we aim to add to our company in the medium term. However, we would like to share with you our extraordinary solutions that we are working on in the long term and starting from now. We need to go a bit further from chemistry and become intertwined with technology; this is also one of the most popular topics of our time: artificial intelligence technology. Of course, artificial intelligence is not a topic that only concerns electronics, automotive or defense, we also thought about how we could include this within chemistry. This thought of ours dates back about a year ago. Artificial intelligence really is a tremendous investment requiring a 5-10 year R&D and improvement process, an autonomous system and software for it. We have about 13-14 years of chemistry know-how and knowledge accumulation. As a chemical company, we operate in a sector with many R&D projects, formulations and recipes, and we conduct thousands of trials. As a result, we try to get an output from these tests. Our long-term project idea is to place these in an autonomous system, prepare a database with what our customers want as a chemical company, and be able to obtain fast and accurate results with artificial intelligence technology adapted to these requests. As you know, today's biggest problem is time, and as a chemical company, using time in a very agile manner is a quality that will set you apart from your competitors. We have started work with the aim of saving time and providing fast solutions to show our sectoral difference.