BotswanaPost Chief Executive Officer Cornelius Ramatlhakwane says they have redesigned their business model into four major functions as a way of addressing the turbid problems at the parastatal. The new model, according to Ramatlhakwane, has seen more people being pushed to the customer facing frontline to maximise efficiency and improve the “revenue to labour cost” ratio.
“This speaks to operational effectiveness and efficiency, and the new model is called the “Value Centre Organisation” which is derived from the Lean principles of high performance,” he said.
The CEO also said BotswanaPost scan revealed that the structure was top heavy with 44 percent of total annual payroll being consumed by only 18 percent of staff based at the head office. He added that they had more than 107 temporary staff at the branches, and support was centralised at the head office.
“Our transformation journey has been faced with challenges, as transformation requires significant financial resources. We needed to diversify in order to sustain our operations as a business while continuing to meet the obligation to provide a traditional mail service,” he said.
Ramatlhakwane also spoke of ensuring sustainability of the value centre model which he said they introduced an effective performance management system called “System For Managing (SFM)”. He added that SFM is an activity based performance management system that is real time and easy to use. According to Ramatlhakwane, SFM ensures that all staff are cognisant of what is expected of them.
“Operations and technology are to provide vital support functions of mail operations and technology within BotswanaPost, including business continuity planning, reliable operational infrastructure and innovation,” said Ramatlhakwane.
He spoke of the commercial part of the business which combines the retail network, business development, marketing and communications, in order to create a seamless value chain in development, sales and channels.
For his part BotswanaPost Chairman of Board of Directors Polokoetsile Motau said the Board adopted and approved management request to perform a business performance improvement scan in the current financial year, to ascertain the real performance of the business so as to inform the decision making with regard to the business strategy going forward from 2017 onwards.
“Our current forecast is that we would achieve a rather modest revenue figure of P440 million for the 2015/16 financial year. This figure would exceed our P500 million target when we include our former subsidiary upon conclusion of audit,” said Motau.
He stated that the parastatal has struggled with its cash cost to income ratio, as they missed it mainly due to very high cost of sales and strategic expenses incurred in their transformation journey. He added that they finished the year 2014/15 with a total loss of P47 million.
“BotswanaPost adopted a strategy called ‘Icon of Excellence in 2011′, to run for a period of 5 years up to March 2016,” he stated. Motau also said the Icon of Excellence strategy was designed to drive the diversification and transformation programme so as to advance towards a diversified service provider. He added that their target for the Icon of Excellence strategy was P500 million revenue and 60 percent cash cost to income ratio.
“We are determined to re-engineer all mission critical processes across our business operations to ensure improved and efficient service delivery that will result in high performance,” he stated.
