Summer successes in Cape Town

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IBG - SA Instrumentation & Control Buyers' Guide

January 2009 News

Following the success of its first summer conference, held recently in Cape Town, The Association for Operations Management of Southern Africa (SAPICS) has announced that it is already planning next year’s event, as well as a summer conference in Durban.

Both the Durban and Cape Town conferences will take place in October 2009.

This year’s SAPICS conference attracted more than 100 delegates, including students from Stellenbosch University. “The participation of the youngsters is extremely exciting,” commented SAPICS president, Ken Titmuss. “In order to address the current skills deficit in the supply chain sector, it is crucial that we step up our efforts to attract skilled people into the profession, and promote supply chain and operations management as careers among students at tertiary institutions.”

The speaker line-up included Farayi Kambarami, renowned tactical planner and president of the South African Chapter of the Institute of Business Forecasting and Planning. His presentation, entitled: 'Sales and operations planning – an entry visa into the competitive present', introduced sales and operations planning to delegates as an enabler of business survival in an increasingly competitive world. “The business environment and competitive landscape is getting tougher by the day,” Kambarami says. “Sales and operations planning, which aims at ensuring that businesses meet their customers’ expectations in an efficient and internally coherent manner whilst delivering on their own targets, is becoming an increasingly critical process and organisations that do not adopt it do so at their peril.”

Farayi Kambarami

The SAPICS Summer Conference followed on immediately from the Lean Summit Africa 2008, which also took place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, with a full day of workshops at the UCT Graduate School of Business the preceding day. Aiming to increase the African business community’s knowledge of Lean tools, and promote the adoption of Lean as a means of improving product and service delivery while reducing costs, the Lean Summit Africa 2008, was exceptionally well attended according to the event organisers.

For more information contact Wendy Zipp, Express Communications, +27 (0)11 524 0988, [email protected]

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Summer successes in Cape Town

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