The glitz and glam of SA’s logistics landscape

You can’t solve logistics problems in the boardroom. You must fix them at ground level, says MIKE FITZMAURICE.

South Africa’s logistics sector has become obsessed with glitz and glam. I say that because that is exactly what it is. Today, logistics executives spend most of their time in the boardroom, debating high-powered PowerPoint presentations filled with fancy graphs, heat maps and tables that tell us absolutely nothing we don’t already know at ground level. In fact, at ground level, we knew it long before it ever reached the boardroom. Nine times out of 10, we had already solved the problem before it made it onto slide 27.

The rest of the time is spent on the boardroom circuit. AGMs, logistics indabas, golf days, awards dinners and networking cocktail parties – where fellow boardroom junkies network with each other. All of which achieves absolutely nothing.

This is precisely why they are so far removed from the realities of logistics at ground level, where the real problems exist. You cannot understand a 7-km queue at Lebombo from a bar chart in Sandton. You cannot understand driver harassment, extortion or a customs system failure from a KPI dashboard.

So, who is “we”?

You might well ask, who is “we”? We are the hands-on logistics experts: the ones who live in the trenches day in, day out, 24/7/365, alongside transporters and truck drivers. We network too… but we network differently. We network with transporters on the roadside at 2am; with drivers sleeping in their cabs at Beitbridge; with well-established, high-level public- and private-sector contacts who can actually pick up the phone and make something happen.

These contacts enable us to resolve non-tariff barriers (NTBs) in real time, decongest border posts and reduce queues stretching for kilometres to a trickle, secure the release of trucks impounded by customs and intervene to stop the harassment of truck drivers by law enforcement agencies – among many other things.

While the boardroom junkies are networking over cocktails, we are keeping the wheels of trade rolling. South African trade does not move because of a strategy document. It moves because someone on the ground refused to accept “the system is offline” as an answer. It moves because someone knows the shift commander by name. It moves because someone is willing to stand in the heat and the dust with the driver until the problem is fixed. You can’t solve logistics problems in the boardroom. You must fix them at ground level.

The logistics conundrum

This is the great conundrum facing our sector: we have no shortage of strategy; we have a shortage of execution. We have no shortage of people who can describe the problem beautifully; we have a critical shortage of people who can fix it, physically, on the ground.

Until South Africa’s logistics executives – the boardroom junkies – are prepared to climb down from their ivory towers, put on their boots and get their hands dirty at ground level, nothing will fundamentally change in South Africa’s logistics sector.

Reports will be written. Conferences will be held. More cocktails will be drunk. But trucks will still queue. Costs will still rise. Trade will still suffer. Because logistics is not a theoretical discipline.