Siyabonga Gule
A Durban entrepreneur who was a crucial part of the team that contributed to helping Transnet overcome serious shipping backlogs in the ports of Durban and Cape Town has been nominated as a finalist for a continental business award.
Beapo, a supply chain management and logistics company founded by Siyabonga Gule, is a finalist in the Africa Supply Chain Excellence Awards which celebrate companies that have excelled in the sector.
Gule, an industrial engineer who previously worked for Transnet Engineering, was quick to point out to the Mail & Guardian this week that he was just one cog in the machinery that led to Transnet solving part of its waterside equipment spares dilemma which resulted in backlogs of crisis proportions at both ports last year.
The media regularly reported on the long queues of vessels waiting to enter the Port of Durban during 2023, a crisis which threatened to damage the reputation of the country’s busiest port. The port moved about 4.03 million 20-foot equivalent units in 2023 and has a target to raise this to 4.2 million for the 2023-24 financial year.
Gule collaborated with Transnet management, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) Scania and Kalmar, which supply rubber tyre gantries (RTGs) — the cranes that move containers off ships — to overcome the crisis caused by a global shortage of engine spares that had brought some of these cranes to a standstill at both ports.
The shortage resulted from the diesel-fuelled engines for the cranes being displaced globally as OEM shift to greener technology, Gule said. But the team sourced smaller diesel-fuelled engines that he thought could be modified to produce sufficient energy to drive the nine cranes that needed these spares.
“It was a joint-venture solution. A joint-venture solution because I know what is happening on the side of Transnet and they [Scania] know what’s happening with the engines,” Gule said.
“They only had DC13 four-cylinder engines but Transnet needed DC19-cylinder engines. Scania told us it would take a year to manufacture the engines needed.
“We were trying to find out if there is a way to modify this engine but we couldn’t just do that because the problem is that the RTGs were manufactured by another OEM, Kalmar, and, although Scania had provided the engines, they were branded by Kalmar.”
Gule said Kalmar, which owns the intellectual property for the rubber tyre gantries, had wanted to work on providing the replacement engines, rather than handing over the design drawings for the cranes that the team needed to modify the smaller engines and get the cranes working faster.
In the end, after intense negotiations between the OEMs and Transnet, Kalmar handed over the drawings and the diesel engines were modified in Cape Town to meet the specifications required to operate the cranes. The project was completed within three months and the engines delivered in November 2023, nine months ahead of the one-year lead time it would have taken to build them from scratch.
Gule started his career at SA Breweries before joining Sasol and then Transnet, where he worked for eight years on process improvements to optimise business, save costs and increase operational efficiencies across its divisions, including ports and rail.
He said he was frustrated that there were insufficient positions to employ young graduates who worked at the state-owned entity for short periods and wanted to do something about it. So, he started Beapo in 2016, initially as a consulting business to help companies to implement systems such as Lean Six Sigma to improve operational efficiency.
He soon landed a big contract with a mining firm in KwaZulu-Natal, beating the likes of KPMG and Deloitte for the deal to help the company figure out what was wrong with its operations and causing it to make a loss. There was also an allegation that some of its supervisors were “sabotaging” operations.
Gule hired 25 people, including young engineering graduates, mostly part time, who helped him research the problem for 12 months.
The finding was that the company’s weaknesses lay in the supply chain — a lack of available spares during breakdowns and the exorbitant sums that it was paying to OEMs. There was also an element of “profiteering” by some of its staff who were allegedly receiving kickbacks from the OEMs, which partially explained the price rip-off.
Gule had extensive knowledge of dealing with OEMs from his time at Transnet, so he spotted the inflated pricing immediately. After producing a report on where the company’s problems lay, he was hired to find the solution, which partly involved sourcing equipment spares from different OEMs. This led to procurement savings, reducing prices from 60% to 30% on critical commodities.
Beapo also assisted an insurance company that was making a loss and wanted to retrench almost 100 employees.
“We turned them around to have profits of R4.5 million and saved those 97 jobs,” Gule said.
It was the contract with the mining company that pivoted Gule’s business to focus on supply-chain efficiencies, which eventually led him back to Transnet to offer solutions to some of its problems, such as the shortage of spares for the cranes.
The business also provides front-end loaders and workers, who offload trains in Cape Town, again driving his dream of contributing to job creation.
Gule said it was “rewarding and exciting” to be nominated among the 28 finalists for the award. But his focus remains on helping businesses improve their operations to expand the economy and unlock the potential of the country as a gateway to the continent.
“We are passionate about seeing the potential of the ports and helping them to digitise, and to move forward the potential of the supply chain, understanding the impact that it has for the economy and also to create jobs.
“Our economy will open up like ever before. We have got a strong advantage in Africa with our ports, road and rail infrastructure,” he said.