Strategy and Culture: Hidden Secrets and Soft Skills in Supply Chain Best Practices from Africa

Objective: The paper identifies strategy and cultural hidden secrets and soft skills pertaining to supply chain management in African contexts that are pertinent to supply chain and operations management. Prior work: Africa is increasingly becoming attractive for not only multi-nationals but supply chain businesses that either want to diversify or expand their foot print. The market is complex, turbulent and highly competitive (Porter, 1986) and requires significant knowledge and understanding of the local context but also culture (Johnson, 1987; 1992; 2000), diversity and institutional dynamics (Ogbonna et al., 2002). Approach: Due to the complex nature of the emerging markets, the paper draws from multiple-disciplines (Sociology, Business, Management) and theoretical approaches namely: culture and strategy; Ubuntu, stakeholder theory and systems thinking, to elicit best practices. Utilizing qualitative methods comprising case study, interviews, focus group discussions and extensive document analysis, the study covers a variety of management practices ranging from strategy, culture to hyper market management. Results: This paper highlights lessons from successful supermarket chains in Africa particularly the hidden secrets and soft skills that are often ignored in mainstream operations and supply chain management or strategy research. Findings underscore the lessons of understanding strategy and culture implementation through practicing cultural values, treating the customer as a queen/king, knowing political skills, being a learning organisation and implementing continuous improvement. Implications: It contributes to management theory for academics, researchers & managers through strategy and culture, proposing inclusion of the cultural diversity into strategy implementation as a critical force affecting the behaviour of people inside the organization. Managers should take into account the cultural context and use it to promote organizational business excellence. Value: These lessons for business excellence are discussed within the context of external and internal organisational pressures in emerging economies and provides value to ward off competition in emerging economies. The paper fills a gap in qualitative research that is missing in supply chain or operations management and points out the fact that traditional supply chain management practices may be ineffective due to the complex and unique local characteristics of African emerging economies

Load compensation : design of a real time analysis and control device

Includes bibliographical references.The aim of this thesis is to produce a load compensator for a three-phase system. It should be simple, accurate and affordable. The three-phase load compensator design is based on a more recent definition of power factor. Attempts to establish a universally acceptable definition can be traced as early as 1920 at the 36th Annual convention of the American Institution of Electrical Engineers. Subsequently, a number of definitions have been adopted by different scholars. Each definition can lead to a different compensator solution. This problem, for example, is illustrated by Eammanuel [25]

How relevant to sub-Saharan Africa is the Kyoto Protocol?

The African Recovery Journal once referred to it as, ‘an opportunity for African countries to attract new financing for their own sustainable development’. It was indeed waited for with much anticipation. In fact, today, it is readily observable that the international Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) market is becoming increasingly dynamic and projected to grow exponentially. However, judging from hard facts on the ground, the reality in sub-Saharan Africa is grim. Moreover, analysts are forecasting a convergence in the market; towards a focus on a few project types in a limited number of host countries. On this scale both, Kenya and Uganda are non-existent as are the rest of their sub-Sahara African compatriots. This paper briefly looks at the history of the CDM and what could have gone wrong for an instrument that had so much promise for subSaharan Africa

Navigating non-sense by exemplifying situated life experience and intergenerational heritage knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development learning spaces

The method which people use in acquiring knowledge is functionally interdependent with, and thus inseparable from, the substance of the knowledge they possess, and especially from their basic image of the world. If this image is different, the method they devise for acquiring knowledge is, as a matter of course, different too. (Elias, 1978:64)This paper uses an activity system perspective to probe the related problems of knowledge abstraction and a lack of relevance as a modern legacy of colonial education practices in Africa. Its purpose is to contemplate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) pedagogy to support learning that might be better situated in and resonate with local African contexts and the emerging sustainability concerns in everyday life. Colonial education trajectories and the recent inclusion of new environmental knowledge in African curriculum and civic learning contexts are examined. This points to how circulating environment and sustainability knowledge is being constituted in disciplinary fields as abstract concepts that are often difficult to relate to local sustainability concerns. Socio-cultural heritage and intergenerational meaning making are explored to uncover better situated ways of navigating much of the abstract ‘non-sense’ confronting African learners in many modern education contexts today. Illustrative examples of historical patterns of exclusion are scoped and two cases of pedagogical innovation are examined to contemplate how to navigate better situated and more relevant learning processes. Enacted in situated and co-engaged ways, ESD practices may enable the socio-cultural capital and environmental realities of local social-ecological contexts to articulate with better situated sustainability propositions for transitioning to more peaceful, just and sustainable futures

Evaluating the impact of consumer behaviour on the performance of domestic solar water heating systems in South Africa

South Africa experienced a rapid expansion in the electric power consumer base after 1994 that was not matched by corresponding investment in the country’s generation capacity. By the dawn of 2008, the situation had reached a critical point, with regular countrywide blackouts and load shedding and is expected to persist for several years, before the proposed new base stations can come online. Currently, 92% of the country’s electricity is generated in coal-based power stations and are responsible for the country’s heavy carbon footprint. Additionally this power must crisscross the country to distant load centres via an aging transmission infrastructure and in the process massive amounts of energy are lost particularly during peak power demand. Electricity consumption in South African households accounts for approximately 35% of peak demand, with water heating constituting 40% of that. The country has abundant sunshine and solar water heating technology and offers one of the most viable compiementary solutions to the country’s energy and environmental crises. Moreover the location of the systems at the consumer end means that the need to upgrade the transmission infrastructure can also be differed.Application of technology alone however, may not necessarily result in the required energy savings particularly in cases of uninformed consumer usage. In this paper the authors evaluate the impact of consumer behaviour on the performance of domestic solar water heaters in South Africa and suggest measures that could be taken to optimize this performance

Making a case for white light-emitting diodes in the Western Cape

Within the context of the energy crisis in the Western Cape, the Provincial Government and Eskom (the South African power utility) embarked on a retrofit campaign to install 5 million compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) in a desperate attempt to decrease the generation deficit. There is also increased pressure for investments in new generation capacity, with all options including the Pebble Bed Modular reactor (PBMR), the Open Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGT) as well as renewable resource technologies being pro-posed. Despite all these concerted efforts it is wide-ly regarded that demand-side technologies, with education programs, subsidies and research fund-ing, have greater scope for achieving success as they tackle the root cause rather than the symptom.The light emitting diode (LED) is a new energy efficient option in the lighting sector that has in recent times been deployed extensively by the City of Cape Town’s Transport Network Operations Department. The technology promises superior attributes that include a longer lifespan and higher energy conversion efficiencies, when compared to the traditional incandescents and fluorescents. This paper details the achievements of the LED in its brief history in the local traffic and signals industry as well as its projected impact on the city traffic light department’s future energy and mainte-nance budget. It is then proposed that these mono-chromatic signal LEDs, which is fast evolving into a white LED, holds the best promise in Cape Town as well as the Western Cape’s energy future if adopted for general lighting in the domestic, commercial and industrial market

New Technologies for Rural Lighting in Developing Countries: White LEDs

Most of the third-world rural areas, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are still without electricity. The few existing off-grid and upcoming installations are remote and characterized by limited resources that call for drastic conservation measures. For the majority of these emerging consumers, lighting is the priority load. Rural electrical lighting load models are characterized by inaccuracies due to technical omissions, highlighted in this paper, and result in energy wastage. Solutions to the third-world problems need not follow similar paths to those of the developed world. In fact, cutting-edge technologies like the cell phone have already leapfrogged rural communications where expensive infrastructure had been perennially cited as the impediment. In this paper, another futuristic technology, the white light emitting diode (LED), for general lighting, is poised to create yet another revolution in African rural electrification

The mapping of maximum annual energy yield azimuth and tilt angles for photovoltaic installations at all locations in South Africa

Photovoltaic (PV) technology is fast emerging as a viable energy supply option in mitigation against environmental degradation through the burning of traditional fossil fuels. The cost of the technology, however, still poses a major challenge, as the efficiencies are generally still quite modest. Current research efforts to improve efficiency are mainly focused on component physics and manufacturing technologies. Little attention seems to be paid to improved system design at field level. Traditionally it is assumed that a panel installed at a tilt angle that is equal to the latitude at a location should achieve maximum annual energy yield for a non-tracking installation. However, in practice, due to a number of factors such as wind speed, wind direction, air temperature, global and diffuse irradiation and other climatic factors, the optimum azimuth and tilt get more convoluted. In this paper the optimum angles (azimuth and tilt) to maximise annual energy yield for fixed angle PV installations at all locations in South Africa have been tabulated. Climate data software together with solar design software were used in determining the angles. The availability of these tables will offer an additional support tool to the country in promoting the growth of PV as a viable alternative energy generation technology for both urban as well as the most secluded rural areas that are not grid connected

The mapping of maximum annual energy yield azimuth and tilt angles for photovoltaic installations at all locations in South Africa

Photovoltaic (PV) technology is fast emerging as a viable energy supply option in mitigation against environmental degradation through the burning of traditional fossil fuels. The cost of the technology, however, still poses a major challenge, as the efficiencies are generally still quite modest. Current research efforts to improve efficiency are mainly focused on component physics and manufacturing technologies. Little attention seems to be paid to improved system design at field level. Traditionally it is assumed that a panel installed at a tilt angle that is equal to the latitude at a location should achieve maximum annual energy yield for a non-tracking installation. However, in practice, due to a number of factors such as wind speed, wind direction, air temperature, global and diffuse irradiation and other climatic factors, the optimum azimuth and tilt get more convoluted. In this paper the optimum angles (azimuth and tilt) to maximise annual energy yield for fixed angle PV installations at all locations in South Africa have been tabulated. Climate data software together with solar design software were used in determining the angles. The availability of these tables will offer an additional support tool to the country in promoting the growth of PV as a viable alternative energy generation technology for both urban as well as the most secluded rural areas that are not grid connected

Energy supply in Malawi: Options and issues

Inadequate energy supply is one of the major problems confronting Malawi and limiting its social, economic and industrial development. This paper reviews the current status of energy supply and demand in Malawi; examines the major sources of energy, current exploitation status and their potential contribution to the electricity supply of the country; discusses key issues facing the energy sector; and identifies broad strategies to be implemented to tackle the energy supply challenges. Using secondary data for its critical analysis, the paper also presents modelling of long-term energy demand forecast in the economic sectors of Malawi using the Model for Analysis of Energy Demand (MAED) for a study period from 2008-2030. Three scenarios namely reference (REF), moderate growth (MGS) and accelerated growth (AGS) were formulated to simulate possible future long-term energy demand based on socio-economic and technological development with the base year of 2008. Results from all scenarios suggest an increased energy demand in consuming sectors with biomass being a dominant energy form in household and industry sectors in the study period. Forecast results reveal that energy demand will increase at an annual growth rate of 1.2% and reach 5160 ktoe in 2030 under REF scenario. The growth rates for MGS and AGS are projected at 1.5% each reaching 4639 ktoe and 5974 ktoe in 2030, respectively. The final electricity demand of about 105 ktoe in the base year will grow annually at average rates of 13.8%, 15.3% and 12.6% for REF, AGS and MGS, respectively. Over the study period 2008-2030 the annual electricity per capita will increase from about 111 kWh to 1062, 1418 and 844 kWh for the REF, AGS and MGS, respectively. The final energy intensity will decrease continuously from about 13.71 kWh/US$in the base year to 3.88 kWh/US$, 2.98 kWh/US$and 5.27 kWh/US$ for the REF, AGS and MGS, respectively in the year 2030. In conclusion, the paper outlines strategies that could be utilized to ensure adequate supply of modern energy which is a key ingredient for achieving sustainable social and economic growth