Dr. Aysegul Ozkavukcu

Dr. Ayşegül Özkavukcu is head of Migros Up; R&D Center at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.; which is pioneer of retail in Turkey. Migros Up is a new age platform which brings startups and Migros experts to conduct co-innovation. She is technical representative of Migros Ticaret A.Ş. in OP2B coalition (One Planet Business for Biodiversity). She received her Ph.D. from Istanbul Technical University Department of Industrial Engineering in May 2017. Her doctoral thesis was about “Hoshin Kanri & New Product and Process Design and Development”. More than 6 years from 2007 to 2013, she took roles at Arçelik A.Ş. which is one of the biggest durable goods firm in Turkey. She developed her core industrial engineering skills and lean six sigma tools as well by adapting the theories to real life problems/applications. She led the lean transformation journey of Tekso Teknik Soğutma Tic. A.Ş. which is a small&medium sized business; from 2013 to 2015. She joined Migros IT&Business Development in 2015. She was responsible for both technological and radical process innovation projects in Migros Ticaret A.Ş till end of 2020. She and her team conducted several R&D projects and aim to finalize them by patent application and/or conference proceeding publication and papers as well.

Her research interests include “new product design and development”, “lean thinking”, “technological innovation”; “customer value chain”; “six sigma and also basic machine learning algorithms”, “strategic management - policy deployment – hoshin kanri”. She has authored several patents and publications on those topics explained above. She teaches about hoshin kanri at İTÜSEM lean management program which is managed by İstanbul Technical University. Finally, with the term fall 2020; she is sharing her expertise as part time lecturer at Bilgi University; the course called “Lean Thinking and New Product and Process Development”.

Besides technical capability; she believes that the self-esteem is one of the major factor that directly impacts development of people and everything in the world.

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