NİT Örme Provides Employment to the Sector with Students Trained at the Pattern Design Center

Interview: Özge Çağıl Sütcü

Founded by Electronics Engineer İrfan Yolcular in 1995, NİT Örme, with 27 years of experience, provides services for the knitwear sector with its spare parts manufacturing, pattern design and training, technical service, electronic card repair departments for flat knitting machines.

NİT Örme manufactures spare parts for flat knitting machines together with the students trained in each department of the company. In addition, it ensures the continuity of production and productivity by supplying the machines and parts needed by knitwear industrialists in Turkey and around the world.

‘‘We offer courses to both educators and students at our Pattern Design Center’’

We conducted an interview with İrfan Yolcular, General Manager of NİT Örme, for the special issue of ‘Turkish Textile Machinery Sector’. Yolcular says the following regarding the Pattern Design Center: ‘‘In our Pattern Design Center, we try to produce solutions that will turn every failure into success. To date, more than a thousand students, teachers, academicians, sector employees and people who want to improve themselves in this field have benefited from our social responsibility projects. We have two guesthouses. Our engineers and the students we train have the opportunity to stay here. We also host educators who come within the scope of our university-industry cooperation projects in our guesthouse and provide them with trainings that we have specially prepared for educators.’’

‘‘Certificate-receiving students are able to find jobs in Turkey and abroad’’

Emphasizing that the most important feature of the trainings is that they are free of charge and hands-on, Yolcular states that the certificate awarded at the end of the course is very important for the employment of the students. ‘‘Since 2015, we have provided Technical Service, Electronic Card Repair and Pattern Design trainings to a total of two thousand students. An important feature of our courses is that we have students practice after the course. The courses are given by trainers who are experts in their fields. At the end of the trainings, we give certificates to the participants. Our certificates are very important because they help our students find jobs in Turkey and abroad.’’

‘‘We Build NİT Örme Workshops in Schools’’

Stating that high school and university students can participate in the free, Applied Pattern Design and Machine Maintenance Trainings, İrfan Yolcular said; ‘‘Since we care about the sustainability of these trainings, we started the Sustainable Social Responsibility in Education project. In this context, we signed protocols with various high schools and universities and established NIT Knitting workshops in these schools. We donate all machinery, software and hardware to the schools where we set up the workshops. If necessary, we provide pattern design and application trainings to our high school and university teachers in our company with our ‘Training of Trainer’ programs.’’

Underlining that they have accomplished very important works with the trainings they provide, Yolcular explains this with an example as follows: ‘‘During the flood disaster in Kastamonu last year, all the machines of a knitwear company were flooded. We immediately bought all the machines and brought them to our Technical Service Department. Our students dismantled all the parts and repaired them. In this way, they had the opportunity to see in practice in a few months the experience that a technician can only gain in five years. We donated the ready-made machines to schools so that students could examine them.’’

‘‘We Allocate 10% of Our Annual Turnover to R&D’’

Stating that NİT Örme is not only a spare parts manufacturer of knitwear machines, İrfan Yolcular said, ‘‘What is important for us apart from production is to invest in people and the sector. It is also important to produce machines or knitwear, but we aim to train engineers. We want to prevent them from starting their business life without experience. Therefore, we use 10% of our annual turnover for our R&D Center. It is very important for us to train qualified personnel for the sector by providing training to our students and to provide them with the opportunity for practice and internship that they cannot find in universities. In this way, we both revitalize the sector and support students’ financial and practical impossibilities as much as we can.’’

R&D center develops innovative products

NİT Örme also develops innovative products at its R&D center. One of them is the ‘Needle Bed Cleaning Machine in Upright Position for Electronic Flat Knitting Machines’, which has very different features from the examples in Turkey and the world and whose design is unique.  The Patent Certificate of the machine, which was presented at various international congresses as an R&D product, was approved.

The need for the company to work on such a machine emerged when the cleaning of needle plates in electronic flat knitting machines caused a great deal of work and time loss for manufacturers. İrfan Yolcular explains the reason for the emergence of the machine in the following words: ‘‘During the knitting process, the dust produced by the yarn and the oils in the machine combine to form a slime (felt) and clog the channels in the needle plate. The clogging of the channels is a situation that prevents the movement of the needles. In knitted fabrics produced in this way, leaks and errors occur. In order to prevent these problems, manufacturers should clean the needle plates periodically and in detail. Manual cleaning of two needle plates on an electronic flat knitting machine takes one full day of two personnel.’’

A First from NIT Örme: Machine for cleaning the needle bed in upright position for electronic flat knitting machines

The benefits of the environmentally friendly machine for the user are listed as follows:

• Dynamic pressure control for needle bearing components of different thicknesses
• Reduction of cleaning time by up to 50% through a multi-nozzle system and a linear moving axis
• Indirect measurement of needle channel contamination using a force sensor,
• Minimizing vibrations in the machine with damping elements
• At the end of the cleaning process, the drying system to be designed to prevent corrosion by minimizing the liquid contact time of the needle plate
• Reduction of cleaning costs of producer companies by 70%.