Housing in Southern Africa September 2016

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September 2016
Industry Buzz
Chryso Southern Africa Group
recently celebrated its 20th
anniversary and Seymore,
who is also Vice-President of Chryso
globally said: “It is imperative that
government finds a way to release
the billions of rands that have been
allocated for new building work in
South Africa. Hopefully, the new civic
leaders, whowill control the country’s
biggest municipal budgets, will lead
the way to at long last provide the
projects building contractors and
materials suppliers have eagerly
awaited for years.”
Seymore noted that during this
time the sector had to step up exports
and operations outside the country’s
borders in order to survive. “This is
not acceptable when so much work
is available in our own country and
we fervently hope local government
will have the skills and willingness to
give the national construction sector
a new lease on life.”
Looking at Chryso Southern Af-
rica’s future, Seymore said “We will
continue to diversify and grow. Re-
search and development will play a
vital role and we will invest at least
4% of sales and revenue into this
facet of our operations. In addition,
we will open a new dedicated Re-
search & Development Centre at our
Newmunicipal leaders can revive building sector
The challenge to find work remains the biggest obstacle to sustained
growth for the South African building industry, and it is to be
hoped that the new municipal leaders will find a way to expedite
long overdue infrastructural projects. This is according to Norman
Seymore, CEO of the Chryso Southern Africa Group.
Norman Seymore
However, the financial manag-
ers often find themselves bur-
dened with time-consuming
investigations to understand why
actual billings don’t match expected
earnings, what causes the deficit, and
how to prevent it altogether.
“Time management needn’t be
that difficult,” says Brendon Gass,
CEOof SmartHR. He says thatwith the
right systems it is easy and there are
many reasons why companies bleed
time (and therefore profits), such as:
workers operate at low capacity and
their time is not tracked; workers
operate at high capacity but don’t
report all their time spent; workers
waste time on unprofitable activities.
This oftenmeans that companies take
on extra capacity already available in
their underutilised workforce; or fail
to curb overruns on allocated project
time. Gass points out that companies
fail to leverage the slack accumulated
against allocated project time or set
sensible key performance indicators
to measure worker performance.
Gass says that with the right
system, financial managers can not
only track down missing time with
ease but also prevent loss entirely.
“It’s important to realise that time
management isn’t just a system for
capturing and billing hours,” warns
Gass. “It’s continuous control of a
dynamic lifecycle with the power
to inform enterprise strategy at all
levels.”
Analytical tools leverage the entire
database – not just time sheets – to
offer a consolidated view of time
dynamics against which to manage
the workforce, develop policy and
protect profits.
For many financial managers,
reconciling lost and billable time is
Time management expertise
Companies employ costly knowledge workers and subject experts
to trade their expertise for an hourly consulting fee and collect a tidy
return on their payroll investment.
a full time job. However, the right
approach – assisted by appropriate
technologies – makes the process
simple and painless. Savings in effort,
improved profitability, cost reduction
and increased strategic visibilitymore
than justify the investment. Gass ad-
vises all financial managers to review
and optimise their timemanagement
processes where possible.
For more information on SmartHR
go to ■
Brendon Gass
head office in Jet Park. An important
plus factor for Chryso Southern
Africa is that we nowproduce our own
raw materials for the formulation of
Chryso’s acclaimed New Generation
admixtures and no longer have to
import these at exorbitant costs be-
cause of the dismal state of the rand.”
The company had also made sig-
nificant progress in the ‘greening’ of
its own products in the past 20 years,
culminating in the pioneering intro-
duction of dustless manufacturing
processes for cementitious products
at its main plants.
“The products Chryso supplies to
the cement industry for fly ash and
slagment production, plus limestone
extension, have enabled cement
producers to significantly reduce
their own carbon dioxide emissions
– something we are very proud of,”
he added. ■