Rewarding supply chain management education

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"Supply chain management training continues to play a critical role in building capacity and ensuring the sustainability of the competiveness of South African logistics and supply chain management in the global context," said Cobus Rossouw, president of SAPICS.

"As sponsors of the awards, the association recognises the importance of vocation excellence across all spectrums of the supply chain. It is important to recognise not only formal tertiary education, but also work experience training, where organisations train young people to turn their passion for the industry into contributions that make business more effective, integrated and profitable."

The judging panel, comprised of Liezl Smith, Gerard de Villiers, Martin Bailey, Mike Johnston, and Charles Dey, evaluated nominations based on criteria relevant to each category. Two criteria that were evaluated across all categories included commitment and dedication to the supply chain management body of knowledge and judging improvements and business benefits achieved by the nominee.

"Judging the corporate educator category is becoming more and more challenging every year," continues Rossouw. "Companies are realising substantial business benefits following training and skills development initiatives; not only are their employees equipped with the knowledge and know how on how to perform their jobs better but there is reward to the organisation when benefits talk to the bottom line."

Training interventions should serve the organisation's strategic objectives rather than solely address the Annual Training report and BBBEE components. Factors in determining whether these interventions address the integrated and cross functional across the business include:

• whether the training provided skills to employees that can be used within the organisation and within the broader supply chain management industry
  
• whether employees were promoted as a result of the intervention
  
• what were the proven results or benefits achieved e.g. client or customer satisfaction improved, cost reduction, job satisfaction, etc.

Rossouw recommends that companies serious about implementing skills development programmes that are beneficial to multiple stakeholders, should support professional, trade or industry institutions and learned or vocational society within the supply chain management industry in order to enable benchmarking.

Winners

• Higher Education Student of the Year

  • Winner: Bashier Enoos (Stellenbosch University)
    
  • Runner Up: Leani Van Jaarsveld (University of Johannesburg)

• Vocational Student of the year

  • Winner: Wilhelm Dalton
    
  • Runner Up: Lazarus Pillay, CPIM, CSCP

• Corporate Educator of the Year

  • Winner: Imperial Logistics

  • Runner Up: SCAW Metals