Turning the tide on South Africa’s deteriorating logistics performance will require significant investment in education, says Professor Jan Havenga of the logistics department at the University of Stellenbosch.
“South Africa’s logistics performance as measured by the World Bank Logistics Performance Index (LPI) has been the best in Brics for the decade of measurement. But, whereas all Brics countries have improved over the decade, our performance has declined – and in the last measurement, China outscored us for the first time,” he says.
“In one of the Barloworld surveys it was found that of the top ten logistics challenges that executives experience in South Africa, skills is the one with the least effective response. Finally, on the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness index, South Africa consistently scores in the lowest five of all countries as far as basic maths and science education is concerned.
This is the near permanent damage to our country and logistics performance – education.”According to Havenga the World Bank’s LPI remains the one tool to compare South A f r ica’s performance to that of other countries.“Our score is quite good for a developing country, but we have declined compared to our Brics partners. That is not a good development. Within the LPI, our measurements like tracking and tracing, timeliness, international shipments do ok, but transport infrastructure and competence have declined.”
Havenga maintains that skills development has to become more of a priority or the consequences of loss of competence will be significant.He has also been a long-standing advocate of a modal change. Utilising different modes of transport, seamlessly – each for the appropriate leg of the freight journey from origin to destination – and providing an overall transport solution that is efficient and sustainable is the goal.
Better routing and scheduling, utilising vehicle capacity better, faster truck turnaround times and vehicle quality are also necessary, says Havenga.He believes there is hope yet for South Africa.
“One of our core strengths is a consolidated logistics service provider (LSP) industry. We have amongst the best large LSP industry players in the developing world. I’m afraid that the current crisis may unravel that advantage to some extent,” he says. “The ‘sexy” things are there – 3Dprinting, drone deliveries, driverless vehicles, electricity, etc. But this is logistics 4.0, which is nothing but the integration of big data and electronic data in “things” in order to eliminate waste. We have people and scientists involved in this research, but we must protect the strengths that we already have, like industry integration.”
