• First of all, would you please introduce yourself?

After completing my undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics at Kadir Has University in high honor’s list, I continued my post-graduate studies with a master’s degree in Business Law at Galatasaray University; then I started my PhD in the Development Economics when my professors invited me back to Kadir Has University. In the meantime, I started working as a research assistant at Kadir Has University and my late professor Dr. Rıfat Barokas, who was a brand in his own name in the field, introduced me to Corporate Finance.

As I decided to work in the field of Corporate Finance after leaving the university, I started working as a Corporate Finance Expert at Besfin Financial Services, founded by Ferda Besli, former Vice President of Akbank. The company was newly founded when I started working at Besfin and I was the first employee of Mr. Besli. We worked very hard together for Besfin and today, it has become an important organization in the sector. After working at Besfin for 4 years, I continued my career at ATÜ as a Financial Modeling Senior Expert.

I participated in certificate programs of various universities with the purpose of continually improving myself and becoming more equipped with new information, and I received certificates in fields of finance, Marketing and Merchandising. The biggest contribution of these certificates to me was to include the knowledge from different disciplines in my work, and this enabled my work to be of high quality and original.

• What are Financial Modeling and MIS department? Can you tell us about your work processes?

Financial Modeling and Management Information System (MIS) are two different lines of work that support each other.

Financial Modeling, found within the Corporate Finance which covers all financial disciplines, is basically a business unit that puts forth financial results by modeling the working mechanisms of the operation. It is very important to have information about the operation and to adopt a strategic approach in constructing the model. Since it is the single point where Operation and Financial Affairs as two different fields in business life meet, financial modeling is also considered as business planning and it has a key role in the strategic planning of the company.

On the side of Financial Modeling, the responsibilities of our department include the estimation of all aspects of new opportunities which have the potential of being included in the core of the company in financial terms and calculation of the value of the company. In addition, we also analyze how planned store development projects would contribute in the current operation. And to that, we can add analyses of how campaigns and promotions would contribute in operations with the support of MIS business field.

MIS provides us with decision making, analysis and control mechanisms by reporting on all the elements of the operation which are found in the form of data. MIS business field has quite an extensive business field since it functions as the reporting mechanism of big data. Since data pool is quite large, especially in organizations operating in retail business such as ATÜ, analyses and reporting we do in this field play a key role in the decision-making process of senior management.

We follow the performances of our operations through weekly and monthly reports prepared by MIS and we support our executives in the commercial decisions that are required to be taken, sometimes by providing details and sometimes by providing the big picture.

• Can you tell us about the formation process of your new department?

We worked really hard together with our senior management in the closing process of AHL as well as new formation of ATÜ; and of course, we worked overtime for new business opportunities such as Istanbul Airport as well while planning for post-closing process. In the process, I started to support our senior management on the side of MIS as well along with modeling.

Raising awareness is the most important task to be done in order to reach the targets in your job. I think that the process of reaching your target is accelerated through being participative, finding a common ground for everybody and, most importantly, receiving support from the people you work with while raising awareness. The reason I say this is because forming a department was my goal that I planned 2 years ago and considering the conditions we find ourselves in, the decision to form a department by merging Financial Modeling and MIS business fields was taken by our senior management in a challenging environment.

• What kinds of qualities are required to work in your department?

From a technical perspective, we are doing works that require a lot of details and techniques, as you can understand from our responsibilities on both sides of modeling and MIS as well as our work flow processes. Even a shadow of a logical error in our works can cause all our works to go to waste, and what’s worse is that we can misguide the company. Because due to our position, the information we provide for the senior management are at the levels where there is no turning back, so we can't really say "oops, sorry." The qualities required to do our job right include high concentration, discipline and correct management of work flow process. As we do all this, we also need to access the source of information by maintaining close contact with operations. I don’t need to talk about financial knowledge or advanced excel knowledge since these are already essential for us.

If there is a more important aspect than the technical side of the work for me, that would be for the person that I’ll work with to be a person of good heart and of integrity without a hidden agenda, and last but not least, to have high levels of energy. As an attitude and style, this is an approach I expect from the people I will work with since works are facilitated when you gain people around you by showing tolerance without discrimination of positions/titles. Most of the time we encounter asocial personalities due to our field of work and we manage to correct this in time with the correct attitude, however the people we deal with have to be open to change; in other words, people who can receive criticism, people without egoistic tendencies and people open to innovation can walk with me on this road.

We work together with senior management while doing all this work. Therefore, we need to have very high levels of interpretation skills to guide our senior management in the right way because we need to interpret hundreds of pages of details into one single picture in order for the senior management to understand everything we summarized at a single glance, i.e. in the first 3 seconds. There is a British saying that shows us where we actually need to be: “Great managers make a tough job look easy.” This is actually my motto.

• What are the most important elements in the work flow? Who does it involve?

Since financial modeling is essentially reflection of an operation on excel sheets to put forth financial results, work flow includes all operations units in the phase of construct as well as involving cooperation with Business Development, Financial Affairs, Human Resources, Category and Commercial departments while all senior management units are included when we reach to the phase of decision-making and strategy development. At this part, it is very important to be organized while providing data flow and constructing modeling. It is also very critical for the healthy progress of the work flow to act like a PMO for producing work by gathering all these different departments under a single roof. Having all the current information in the field and having a command of sector dynamics while doing all this increases the quality of our work. Therefore, we provide creativity and new ideas along with our works by doing online market researches in an actual way.

Since ATÜ Duty Free is a Joint Venture, we work together with the company shareholders TAV, Unifree and indirectly with ADP and Heinemann to provide model works in relation to new opportunities as well as our current operations. At this stage, the task of the company shareholders consists mostly of inquiring our model works. Thus, at Financial Modeling department, it is one of our main duties to provide the necessary answers by having knowledge in terms of operational, strategic approach and financial planning along with doing the actual modeling.

Our most important business partner in the MIS work process is SAP department which creates the data pool. Another responsibility of MIS department is to process and load data coming from operations on SAP data pool. This part consists of a process that enables healthy data generation and correct reporting. And our stakeholders in decision-making, analysis and control process reporting where MIS has an active role consist mainly of operation managers and senior management.

As you see, all of our works are connected to each other and we spread our arms like an octopus through our works that involve many departments.

• Has there been any interesting situation that you’ve encountered to date? If any, how did you resolve it?

As a part of my job, I encounter many different subjects and new adventures every day; I consider myself lucky since not being stuck in a routine enables me to stay active and this increases my commitment to my job. I consider myself very lucky in this sense; I do my job with pleasure and, in turn, my job opens up a door to a different opportunity for me every day.

However, the most striking to my heart has been the works I was involved with during the closing process of Atatürk Airport which had a special place for all of us and for Turkey, and later the support I gave in the process of modeling and feasibility works for our Butik and Old Bazaar operations at the Istanbul Airport, the biggest project of Turkey with an immense significance for the sustainability of ATÜ, from the beginning to the stage of signing of the contracts… It was one of the best experiences I ever had to play a role in realizing this opportunity which was very important for the company. I hope we find such opportunities in the future again.

• How long have you been working at ATÜ? What did you gain from being a part of this company?

I started working at ATÜ on a cold winter day, January4th, 2016; it was rainy outside but I had started a work that I wanted very much. Back then, our office was at the mezzanine of international terminal, there was a gloomy atmosphere, a little dark, but I was very happy and enthusiastic. After entering from that door that day, I continued coming to my work with the same excitement and desire every day.

My motivation in leaving consultancy work and starting at ATÜ was to implement what I learned in the sector in an organization, to experience the work and to observe the added value we created. When I look back today, I see that we spent a wonderful time while working at ATÜ, creating an environment in which beautiful friendships were born. In addition, the opportunities offered to me coupled with close collaboration with the senior management enabled development of executive perspective and foresight in me and provided me with the chance of improving my skills of immediately responding to incidents and being more proactive.

• What are your objectives for the new year, both from personal and departmental perspective?

As a department, one of our leading objectives is to get away from manual reporting and to make reporting more systematic and practical by increasingly integrating our works with SAP system and by keeping pace with the new technology. Along with that, I personally aim to increase executive summary reporting within the core of the company that could give executives an idea within 3 seconds as I mentioned before.

• How many people are there in your team? Can you introduce us your team members?

Ayça Erkuş:

Since our department is still very new, Ayça works with me right now. However, we will grow as a team in the future. As IT department was conjoined with Financial Affairs under the leadership of our CFO Mrs. Deniz, SAP department also joined Financial Affairs and our objective is to work more closely with SAP department under the umbrella of Financial Affairs organization.

Ayça Erkuş has finished her undergraduate studies in United States of America. After graduating from Bryant University, she returned to Turkey and started working at Silk&Cashmere brand in Istanbul. She is experienced with a multifunctional personality since she worked in various departments in ATÜ. About her experiences at ATÜ, she joined ATÜ family in 2014. After working in Customer Experience for 2 years as her first department, she continued to serve in the Category department. While she was continuing her work on Reporting and Analysis, she was transferred to Operation Support department with the formation of a new department. Currently, she continues to work as MIS Manager under the roof of Modeling and MIS.