Transnova is a privately owned supply chain and logistics solutions company with technology at its heart.
With a customer base that includes leading local blue chip companies and global players, Transnova is accustomed to creating solutions to complex supply chain challenges. And as supply chains become more complex, so too those challenges.
“The South African supply chain and logistics industry is quite traditional in a way, but there are signs of this changing ,” says Transnova CEO Eric Gower-Winter, “as our customer base’s world base gets more complex, they transfer that complexity down to their service providers in the logistics and supply chain ecosystem. As the world becomes more digitalised, the pressure for fast service and immediate response grows, putting more time and cost pressure on these service providers.”
Gower-Winter says Transnova is positioned as an organisation that helps to connect entities in this ecosystem digitally, making it easier for them to interact and removing inefficiencies – thus ultimately trying to reduce the complexities that all stakeholders face.
“We blend capabilities in supply chain consulting, technology solutions and operational management to help companies unlock the latent value in their supply chain. We seek to understand a client’s business strategy first, and then design a supply chain strategy and business processes to enable the strategy. We then configure the appropriate IT systems to enable and support the business processes.”
Understanding a client goes beyond just their strategy, however, and encompasses their broader business context. “Our operating model is crafted with the customer’s context in mind and can be from pure advisory or software provision right through to outsourced logistics management services,” Gower-Winter explains. “It may be adapted or extended over time to the customer’s changing environment and circumstances.”
It also extends to Transnova’s network of service providers, Gower-Winter says. “We often find there are well-established local players in their region who really know their market. We tend to deal with the senior management of these companies and find that these small to medium-sized companies actually provide more cost-effective service in their operating areas. It’s about choosing the providers in the supply chain that align best with the strategy of the customer, not just for a particular asset class.”
Technology lies at the heart of Transnova, says Gower-Winter, so everyone in the business is constantly learning and adapting to external and internal challenges as they relate to its approach. The company partners with large technology companies that offer core platforms, which provide leading technology solutions to base and complex problems. “We have developed long-standing partnerships with leading global technology players for the exclusive use, distribution, and local support of these solutions on the African continent. We’re as rigorous about choosing our technology partners as we are about hiring new talent.”
Gower-Winter stresses that forming relationships with these technology partners is crucial too. “We’re on their respective development roadmaps. We provide them with our marketplace requirements and insights, and they let us know if and when that particular solution will be available.”
If a customer cannot wait or requires something unique, Transnova will build it themselves. “Building and refreshing technology is a never-ending pursuit, however,” says Gower-Winter. “Because we’re practitioners at heart, we want to make sure our customers use the technology properly, so a lot of our focus is on usage behaviour and education.”
This comes back to that understanding of a customer’s context, explains Gower-Winter. “When you understand where a customer is going, you can map their future technology needs against that. Once we understand that, we design a solution, implement it side-by-side with their people, have a stabilisation period and ensure our customers are proficient in our technologies and processes before we extract our team. But we always stay behind with our customers in one way or another, providing analytics on how they use the system and refreshing knowledge if needed.”
Source: first published in the Sunday Times Supply Chain feature 2024 by Anthony Sharpe