In January 2008, the black-owned Pamodzi Investment Holdings (PIH) was at a crossroads, as its chief executive officer (CEO), Ndaba Ntsele, sat down with his board to discuss how to finance the growth of the business. Ntsele and co-director, Solly Sithole, had founded PIH’s predecessor, Pamodzi Property Developers, and grown it from nothing in 1979 to a multi-million rand concern, using only debt finance and working capital.

It was November 2014 and just three months since Old Mutual, a well-established, global financial services group, had launched the 2-in-One Savings product to target the South African retail mass market. Anele Mbuya, senior marketing actuary for Old Mutual’s Retail Mass Market, wondered whether the product’s marketing strategy needed to be revitalised for it to achieve the sales forecasts for the next operating period.

Netflorist managing director Ryan Bacher’s wife always gets flowers for Valentine’s Day. His mother always gets some for Mother’s Day. But neither sees him for days around those periods. His head is buried in flowers and gifts, and his mind is racing ahead to ensure that no bouquets are dropped.

MultiChoice customers and the company’s senior management had asked Eddie Moyce, call centre manager for MultiChoice Africa, a multi-channel television platform, to investigate the possibility of improving the response time from the current 80:30 to 80:20 or even 90:10. Recent research had shown that while customers who had phoned the call centre were generally satisfied with the service they received, they were dissatisfied with the length of time it took for their calls to be answered. What would the impact of reducing response times be?

It was the beginning of December 2001. The revised “go live” deadline of 1 March 2002 for IST’s ERP implementation programme was approaching fast and Nico Scholtz, IST’s ERP project manager was not sure that the system would be ready by that date. Moreover, there appeared still to be some strong internal resistance to the system. Scholtz had to recommend a course of action to IST CEO, Harry Coetzee. This is the third in a series of three cases that looks at the ERP implementation process at IST.

No. Pages: 12  

When the new chief executive of IST, Harry Coetzee, took up his position in March 2001, he couldn’t believe the shambles that was the ERP implementation programme at IST. The group had commissioned Resolution Software to implement the Great Plains system, but the process had gone badly awry and was in danger of being derailed completely. What had gone wrong? And what did he need to do to get the process back on track? This is the second in a series of three cases that looks at the ERP implementation process at IST.

No. Pages: 9 . 

In July 2000 the enterprise resource planning (ERP) steering committee of the specialised engineering and information technology group, IST, had a choice between two value-added resellers and their software options: IFS with its own Oracle-based system, or Resolution Software with the Great Plains system. Neither IFS nor Great Plains/Resolution showed the perfect fit and the steering committee had heard many horror stories about ERP implementation at other firms. It did not want the same to happen at IST.

It was December 2000 and John Robertson, the chief information officer (CIO) of Discovery, a healthcare finance and life insurance company, had to decide what to do with DiscoveryWorld, the group’s ecommerce problem child. The project had been conceived at the end of 1999, in the full flush of dotcom optimism. Now the project was a source of ever-increasing conflict and dissension within the group. Operating as a separate division that reported directly to the board, it was gobbling money and rubbing other members of the group up the wrong way with an arrogant and dismissive attitude.

It was mid-June 2005 and Jason Lurie, managing director of the Johannesburg-based Moyo restaurant chain, wanted “world domination” for the Moyo brand. Moyo restaurants – which contained a food, entertainment and retail shopping component – had achieved phenomenal success in the affluent suburbs of Johannesburg and Cape Town, and Lurie believed that the brand could be extended to a variety of products and services. As the first move towards achieving world domination, he was considering opening a 4 000 m² retail store.

No. Pages: 18 

Since the opening of Mowana Spa at the Indaba Hotel in Fourways, north of Johannesburg, three years ago, marketing manager Sharon Hunink had sought to create an experience that would entice her customers to return again and again. The spa industry was becoming increasingly competitive and now, in September 2015, Hunink was reviewing all that she and her team had done to create an experience that would set Mowana apart from the many other day spas in the suburb of Fourways. She wondered what the spa was getting right and what else it could do to grow its customer base.