Ongoing economic and political uncertainty is continuing to put supply chains in southern Africa under pressure. “Despite the change of governments in several countries, not much has changed,” said Dr Robert Besseling, founder and chief executive of EXX Africa. Speaking at the annual Sapics conference in Cape Town recently, Besseling said while President Cyril Ramaphosa now had an official mandate to govern South Africa following the election in May, it was yet to be followed by action. Low economic growth and policy uncertainty persisted. The same could
be said for Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the Kabila family remained as powerful as ever. “Over the past year we have witnessed some tumultuous political change – not just in southern Africa but the continent – and companies are well advised to keep an eye on political, security and economic indicators across the continent and not only in those regions in which they had a footprint. These were however not the only challenges facing the supply chain, said Sean Culey, a business transformation expert from the United Kingdom. “Robotics and artificial intelligence have changed
everything. While automation has been part of the manufacturing industry since the sixties, the scale has intensified and we now have complete automated factories, warehouses, autonomous vehicles, drones and other robots impacting on how we manufacture,” he said. “We thought that selling products was a human activity and
even that has changed with robots taking over this task in shopping centres.” All of this was increasing the uncertainty of the future, he said. “A single T-shirt sewing robot can make as many T-shirts as 17 factory workers in one hour,” said Culey, stressing that it was not business as usual at all.
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“Companies are well advised to keep an eye on political, security and economic indicators across the continent." – Dr Robert Besseling
