In the final week of March 2020, managers across Turkey faced the same set of questions simultaneously: Can our employees work from home? Can we issue invoices remotely? Can we track inventory in real time? These questions had been circulating in strategy meetings for years under headings like ‘future roadmap’ or ‘medium-term priorities.’ The pandemic collapsed that timeline into 72 hours and delivered a binary verdict: digital infrastructure either existed or it did not. There was no middle ground.
Before the crisis, digital transformation rhetoric occupied a prominent place in Turkish business discourse. But the distance between rhetoric and actual investment was significant. In the SME segment particularly, adoption of cloud-based ERP or enterprise software remained limited. Several factors converged to produce this gap: dollar-denominated licensing costs amplified by persistent currency pressure, insufficient in-house IT capacity, a ‘our system works, why change it’ culture, and the absence of business continuity planning as a serious management discipline. The pandemic invalidated every one of these justifications — not gradually, but overnight.
The shift to remote work turned out to be an organizational test before it became a technical one. Companies that could only access their accounting software from inside the office network, that ran their e-invoice processes from a single designated machine, or that managed stock and order data in spreadsheets experienced operational paralysis within the first week. By contrast, companies that had deployed cloud-based ERP, established VPN infrastructure, or migrated to browser-accessible platforms were able to activate remote operations within the same week. The difference between these two groups was not the size of their technology budgets. It was the quality of strategic decisions made in the years prior.
The picture on the e-commerce front was even sharper. In Turkey’s retail, food, and services sectors, companies that had not built a digital sales channel saw revenues collapse to near zero when physical locations closed. Those that had already set up a website, integrated marketplace channels, configured payment infrastructure, and digitized logistics workflows were able to absorb the surge in demand. What stands out here is that most of these companies had not built e-commerce as a growth strategy — they had built it as a secondary channel. The pandemic converted that secondary channel into the primary one. For a company without the infrastructure in place, no such conversion was possible in a matter of weeks.
Supply chain disruptions revealed a different dimension of the same problem. Companies that tracked their supplier portfolios in emails and phone calls, without any digital system providing visibility into order and delivery status, discovered supply failures only after operations had already stopped. For a manufacturing firm with no real-time inventory view, answering the question ‘how many days of production can we sustain’ took days of manual reconciliation. Companies that had invested in digital procurement and supply chain tools could make supplier substitution or inventory optimization decisions far more quickly. In crisis conditions, this difference moved beyond operational efficiency into the territory of organizational survival.
The most common response emerging in Turkey right now is: ‘We need to digitalize fast.’ The urgency is understandable, but the risk is real. Technology decisions made under crisis pressure frequently produce high-cost, low-integration, unsustainable outcomes. Purchasing several disconnected SaaS tools does not constitute digital transformation — it creates digital fragmentation. In Turkey’s current environment, currency pressure compounds this risk: dollar-denominated subscription costs combined with hasty tool selection can push total cost of ownership out of control quickly. The correct move is not to buy tools before understanding processes. It is to identify which process has broken, and then select the right solution for that specific break.
This crisis has demonstrated that business continuity planning is not a luxury reserved for large corporations. For most Turkish SMEs, such planning does not exist in written form. Three questions offer a concrete starting point for any manager: First, can core operations be sustained from outside the office? Second, which systems need to move to cloud or web access to ensure uninterrupted service to customers? Third, is supply chain visibility real-time, or does it depend on daily manual reports? The answers to these three questions determine which digital investment needs to happen first. The pandemic will pass. The relevance of these questions will not.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on January 6, 2020 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.