Ismail Essa:
SANRAL is serious about national economic transformation, creating the position of Transformation Manager and filling it with an engineer and manager who understands every angle of the contracting business. The Transformation Manager will report directly to the CEO. Ismail Essa, previously SANRAL’s Northern Region Manager, stepped into this new position on 3 April.
Announcing the appointment, CEO Skhumbuzo Macozoma made his expectations clear: “The time to bolster government’s economic transformation priorities is now.
Essa has indicated that one of his immediate priorities is to create an enabling environment for small contractors, particularly black-owned businesses, to access opportunities through procurement.
“The first step will be to engage industry role-players across the board – small, large, black- and whiteowned, women- and youth-owned – to ensure our transformation policy is responsive to the dynamics at play in the business environment. Through these engagements, we also hope to establish shared buy-in to achieve our transformation goals and targets.
“We will link up small suppliers with industry bodies, such as the Construction Industry Development Board, as well as with the SA Revenue Service to help them understand the industry and compliance requirements essential to access procurement opportunities.
“For too long the majority of the people in this country have been deprived of economic opportunities and I see this as a chance to level the playing field,” he said.
Essa is an industry heavyweight with 36 years of experience in the roads and civil engineering sector. He worked for 21 years as a contractor with a major listed company before joining SANRAL in 2001 as a Senior Project Manager. Within two years, he was promoted to Regional Manager for the Northern Region (Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and North West) – a position he held for 14 years.
Essa believes every bit of his experience will be valuable in his new role. He understands how the private sector operates, its concerns and its priorities. He is also a passionate advocate of the need for inclusive business approaches and economic transformation.
The concept of supporting small businesses is not new to him. A notable highlight in his career has been the 16 small contractors and 28 suppliers he helped to establish for a project in Orange Farm, Johannesburg, between 1994 and 1996.
“The country was in transition, prejudices of the past were still fresh, yet together with my team, we prevailed and achieved our plan.
“However, 23 years into democracy, the industry has been transforming slowly and our intention now is to give the process a renewed energy,” he said. “SANRAL service providers need to reflect the demographics of the country. It is my job to reduce the dominance of big contractors, as this is a major barrier to small and new contractors and consultants accessing opportunities offered by SANRAL.”
While engineering and construction contractors and consultants will benefit most from this intensified commitment to transformation, the approach will
also include service providers in fields such as information technology, communication, financial and legal services.
Essa holds a BTech in civil engineering and an MBA. He is a longstanding member of the South African Institute of Civil Engineering (Saice)
and is registered with the South African Council for Project and Construction Management Professions.
SANRAL’s Design and Construction Manager in the Northern Region, Willem van der Merwe, will be the Acting Regional Manager for the Northern Region until the position is filled.
While no one wants to be a slave to their phone – or any smart device – it’s hard to deny that these pocket PCs can be useful in streamlining your workflow. By downloading and installing the right apps, engineers – indeed, any professionals – have access to platforms and utilities that will remove much of the drudgework from their
day-to-day lives. Here are just some of the free applications that can make your professional (and personal) life a little easier to manage...
Google+
If you don’t have a Google+ account, sign up for one immediately. Beyond its ubiquitous mail service, Google gives users access to a whole host of admin apps that are as neat as they are useful. Google Calendar and
Google Docs can be shared with a multitude of users, meaning if your project requires collaboration, dates and changes are updated in everyone’s account instantaneously. Loaded onto a smartphone, Google Maps also provides a GPS, providing a history of one’s movements, travel notifications and warnings about traffic incidents on scheduled journeys. On top of that, users gain access to Google Photos – which boasts both photo scanning and facial recognition – and Google’s cloud storage. This is one app you can’t afford to be without.
KeePass
It probably goes without saying that having the same password for multiple accounts – be they email, social media or shopping services – is a very, very bad idea. The problem most people face is the fact that remembering myriad passwords is something of a chore. KeePass has your back in this regard. This free-to-use open-source app helps users manage their passwords, masterlocking them on one database under one key. There’s only one password you need to remember to gain access to all of your accounts this way.
Slack & Trello
If your project involves more than one person, Slack and Trello are something of a godsend. The former
is a work channel in which users can communicate instantaneously with each other and admins can divide up the “chats” among different categories. This way, collaborators on a project aren’t bothered with details they don’t require and admins can keep the ship running steadily.
Trello is essentially a virtual job board, complete with post-it notes. Admins create a card for a task, fill in what’s required and then assign it. Users can upload documents, photos and any other sort of file to the card. And once it’s completed, they can move it between queues to show the status of the task. Both Slack and Trello are free to use and have smart-device apps to boot.
Electronic Signature
Gone are the days when users would need to scan and email a document with their signature on it. Thanks to the introduction of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (2002), South Africa signed up to the global practice of recogonising the legality of electronic signatures. In other words, a picture of your signature is legitimate and apps such as Adobe’s Acrobat or GnuPG can provide a level of security in this regard – both allow users to see if a document has been tampered with or altered in any way and both can be used to create cryptographically protected signatures.