Social and economical investigation of furniture manufacturing enterprises of Kayseri province

Industrial productions on a sector basis are more intensified in some regions depending on degree of sustainability of certain production factors. In forest industry area, Kayseri is one of those intensified provinces. By looking at the forest industry data of our country, Kayseri is one of the leading provinces regarding production and exportation of forest products, although this region is listed on the bottom according to forest value, low population, lack of qualified employees and abundance of using old technology. The sustainability of the current status will be possible by following the developments and trends closely in the world. However, those developments are happening very rapidly and this will be very difficult to follow and apply the necessary changes.Apart from the outside of the world, domestic developments and events contribute to the rising of the important results. It is known that Kayseri, especially in the forest products industry, especially in the furniture industry has shown great improvement in the last 20 years. Especially Kayseri went to institutionalization and branding in this sector. With this, Kayseri opened its way to foreign markets and has been remarkable region for export and import rates in Turkey and in the world. In 2001, after the economic crisis passed, Kayseri never slowed down and has shown that it is one step ahead. Taking those affecting factors into account, the current status of furniture industry was determined by a questionnaire developed by face to face interviews of entrepreneurs, the problems were identified and solutions were try to be offered.The evaluation of the results shown that, in terms of number of employees, capacity utilization increases as the enterprises get larger. Parallel to this, number of qualified employees is also increased. Similarly, the size of the enterprises is increased if occupational standards are taking into account, they are in close relationship to various institutes and new administrative developments are closely followed. It was also determined that as the size of the enterprise increases, amount of furniture manufactured and use of technology is also increased. Furthermore, the raw materials are obtained from other resources not from forest directorate. And also there is lack of capacity because of current market conditions.