ÇORUM, TURKEY — Alapala, a manufacturer of milling equipment, received the R&D Center Certificate from the Turkish Ministry of Industry and Technology.

The new R&D center will allow Alapala to expand its investments on innovative solutions for the agriculture and food industry. The company will focus on the development of new milling machinery and plans to contribute to the Turkish economy with the export of machinery.

Speaking about this development, Makina Görkem, Alapala’s chief executive officer (CEO), said Alapala has concentrated heavily on innovation since its foundation and emphasized that the R&D Center Certificate awarded by the Turkish Ministry of Industry and Technology is of great importance in this regard.

“Our goal as a company is to introduce innovative ideas for our customers,” Alapala said. “For this reason, we emphasize great importance to R&D activities and investments in this field. We allocate an average of 2% of our annual turnover to R&D activities. We carry out R&D activities on a 250 square meter area and 19 people work in the center.

“Currently, we continue our works for our product range and new projects. In this period of industry and robotic technologies progressing very rapidly in the world, we are trying to do our best so that our company and our country does not fall behind in these areas. We will focus more on our efforts in this area with the incentives to be provided through this certificate awarded by the Ministry."

Alapala also is targeting to create smart factories.

“In the last three years, we have completed one KOSGEB and one TÜBİTAK Industrial R&D projects,” Alapala said. “The R&D facility project with a budget of approximately 3 million Turkish Lira is ongoing since 2017. Our project application to the Ministry of Economy is under evaluation. We have also participated in the INOSUIT program to build the SYSTEMSEL and corporate infrastructure of innovation as part of the University-Industry cooperation. This and such initiatives and investments will put Alapala and Turkey forward in terms of industry in the world.”

Alapala builds turnkey plants in a range of capacities and is one of the top 500 exporters in Turkey. It has references in more than 100 countries and four continents.