Housing in Southern Africa September 2016

Industry Buzz

Newmunicipal leaders can revive building sector The challenge to find work remains the biggest obstacle to sustained growth for the South African building industry, and it is to be hoped that the new municipal leaders will find a way to expedite long overdue infrastructural projects. This is according to Norman Seymore, CEO of the Chryso Southern Africa Group.

the way to at long last provide the projects building contractors and materials suppliers have eagerly awaited for years.” Seymore noted that during this time the sector had to step up exports and operations outside the country’s borders in order to survive. “This is not acceptable when so much work is available in our own country and we fervently hope local government will have the skills and willingness to give the national construction sector a new lease on life.” Looking at Chryso Southern Af- rica’s future, Seymore said “We will continue to diversify and grow. Re- search and development will play a vital role and we will invest at least 4% of sales and revenue into this facet of our operations. In addition, we will open a new dedicated Re- search & Development Centre at our fail to leverage the slack accumulated against allocated project time or set sensible key performance indicators to measure worker performance. Gass says that with the right system, financial managers can not only track down missing time with ease but also prevent loss entirely. “It’s important to realise that time management isn’t just a system for capturing and billing hours,” warns Gass. “It’s continuous control of a dynamic lifecycle with the power to inform enterprise strategy at all levels.” Analytical tools leverage the entire database – not just time sheets – to offer a consolidated view of time dynamics against which to manage the workforce, develop policy and protect profits. For many financial managers, reconciling lost and billable time is

head office in Jet Park. An important plus factor for Chryso Southern Africa is that we nowproduce our own raw materials for the formulation of Chryso’s acclaimed New Generation admixtures and no longer have to import these at exorbitant costs be- cause of the dismal state of the rand.” The company had also made sig- nificant progress in the ‘greening’ of its own products in the past 20 years, culminating in the pioneering intro- duction of dustless manufacturing processes for cementitious products at its main plants. “The products Chryso supplies to the cement industry for fly ash and slagment production, plus limestone extension, have enabled cement producers to significantly reduce their own carbon dioxide emissions – something we are very proud of,” he added. ■

Norman Seymore

C hryso Southern Africa Group recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and Seymore, who is also Vice-President of Chryso globally said: “It is imperative that government finds a way to release the billions of rands that have been allocated for new building work in South Africa. Hopefully, the new civic leaders, whowill control the country’s biggest municipal budgets, will lead

Time management expertise Companies employ costly knowledge workers and subject experts to trade their expertise for an hourly consulting fee and collect a tidy return on their payroll investment.

H owever, the financial manag- ers often find themselves bur- dened with time-consuming investigations to understand why actual billings don’t match expected earnings, what causes the deficit, and how to prevent it altogether. “Time management needn’t be that difficult,” says Brendon Gass, CEOof SmartHR. He says thatwith the right systems it is easy and there are many reasons why companies bleed time (and therefore profits), such as: workers operate at low capacity and their time is not tracked; workers operate at high capacity but don’t report all their time spent; workers waste time on unprofitable activities. This oftenmeans that companies take on extra capacity already available in their underutilised workforce; or fail to curb overruns on allocated project time. Gass points out that companies

Brendon Gass

a full time job. However, the right approach – assisted by appropriate technologies – makes the process simple and painless. Savings in effort, improved profitability, cost reduction and increased strategic visibilitymore than justify the investment. Gass ad- vises all financial managers to review and optimise their timemanagement processes where possible. For more information on SmartHR go to www.smarthr.co.za ■

September 2016