Unemployment rates in and around mining communities increase annually, with limited new job opportunities emerging. Enterprise and Supplier Development (ESD) is of national importance and can unlock significant organisational value.
SMMEs (small, medium and micro enterprises) make up about 98% of the formal business economy, but mining faces high barriers to entry, expansion and meaningful participation in the supply chain, and thus only employ 28% of the working population.
Bringing mining SMMEs into the supply chain
ESD actively promotes the economic wellbeing and advancement of historically disadvantaged people by supporting their businesses and employment creation. But business opportunities in the low complexity, low-value categories are saturated, with high barriers to entry into value-adding commodities segments. With many mines taking a compliance-driven approach to ESD, there’s a limited focus on true economic transformation.
Failure statistics for SMMEs are high – up to 60% fail within the first two years of operations. For mines, the challenge is to navigate two regulatory frameworks; meet organisational and community needs for transparency, inclusion and support; and turn their ESD programmes into a strategic advantage.
For this reason, Accenture and Adapt Digital Solutions have brought to market a multi-tenant Mining ESD Platform for the mining industry that is designed to ramp up meaningful outcomes for the entire mining ecosystem. It is a Salesforce and cloud-based platform available as a service.
This ESD platform can change the way mines interact with and develop suppliers in their communities. It extends spending with SMMEs across multiple procurement areas. It enhances support and success rates by making a broader range of SMME support initiatives visible and available on a larger scale. The Mining ESD Platform is designed to evolve your engagement with local suppliers from publishing opportunities to end-to-end development of local suppliers and enterprises.
How the platform works
The platform serves three fundamentals: to Transform by driving empowerment within the supplier base, to Include by embracing smaller enterprises, and to Support by developing smaller enterprises. Ultimately, the platform allows us to go from transparent and scaled publication of opportunities to an extensive local supplier and opportunity management, administration of interactions with ESD beneficiaries (from gap analysis to dashboards and reports), and digital management of funding, loans and other development initiatives.
The Mining ESD Platform supports the entire ESD cycle, enabling it to scale and deliver higher impact. It enables supplier registration, business registration verification, and technical and development support. It publishes procurement and development (including funding) opportunities, allows suppliers to indicate interest and apply for these opportunities, and provides feedback on application outcomes for shortlisted organisations. The ESD platform provides avenues through which suppliers can get support to become better equipped to engage with mines and provides mines with visibility of the supplier’s readiness to contract on multiple dimensions. The platform will also enable reporting, supporting mines to demonstrate their performance against DMRE and DTI targets for ESD.
