FEATURE
CHANGING TIMES:
How the pandemic pivoted this SA engineering consultancy into a 4IR SaaS platform / By Daniel Mpala / South African industrial engineer Katlego Malatji believes that when it comes to manufacturing, Africa is lagging so far behind with technology that it is making the continent less competitive globally. “It’s really sad because we are one of the richest continents in terms of raw materials, but we are not doing a very good job in terms of processing that raw material into value added goods and then selling them,” she says.
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he explains that, for example, South Africa’s manufacturing industry is operating at a comparative disadvantage relative to countries like China who are actively using Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies like automation, robotics, AI and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). She says as a result of the efficiencies realised by these technologies, China is selling goods at a fraction of the cost, while local manufacturers on the other hand are losing out — despite working twice as hard — as their processes are much more labour intensive.
Malatji — who’s over the past six years built a name for herself as an international 4IR implementation specialist working for automative manufacturer BMW — points out that globally, the manufacturing industry is generally “moving in the direction of 4IR”. She strongly believes this is the trajectory Africa should be taking too. This need for African 4IR solutions is what inspired her to start her own consultancy — ProjectOne Engineering. Malatji studied Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at Wits University for three years ending in 2014, thereafter she took up an Industrial Engineering diploma at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) before attaining her BTech in Industrial Engineering at the University of South Africa. “My expectations going into studying engineering were that we were going to be
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working on 4IR. I didn’t know the name at the time, but I had the idea that engineering is finding the solutions for the future - the robotics of it, the system optimisation — but that wasn’t the reality of it, at least not then in South Africa,” she says. Her first job saw her work as an Industrial Engineering trainee at a company in Brits which specialised in supplying electrical protection and factory automation solutions. She remembers that during her stint there in 2015, she noticed that there was not much tracking of data going on at the company. “Data wasn’t seen as gold, which already at the time I thought ‘We need data, we need much more data than what we have’,” she recalls. Later that year Malatji joined BMW South Africa (SA) as an intern focusing on quality management, and particularly on optimising processes to minimise defects. She says she learnt a lot from that role. “It felt like I was at a a new university because they had automation —to a level, they had systems that were in place, standards that were in place, and data was gold there,” she explains. However, despite this, within six months Malatji began seeing opportunities for implementing 4IR techniques. Some of the suggestions she made included improvements like using cameras to detect defects. She says at the time the responses she got were always around “budgets and business cases”. “They had processed that had been going on for years and years, and those processes were working, they were good processes that were
working. My ambition was for there to be more new technology put into place, not just for the sake of technology, but for the sake of seeing us move from one level of production to the next,” she explains. In 2017 Malatji made history in the company by becoming the first South African to be independently hired from a BMW SA plant to work at BMW US. In her new role as a Logistics Integrator at BMW Manufacturing in Greenville, South Carolina she chose a project which allowed her to work on the full-scale introduction of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) — something she said had never been done at any other BMW plant at the time. In essence the project entailed taking normalsized fork lifts and tuggers and outfitting them with hardware and software which effectively made them autonomous. “ At the time I didn’t know it, but when I got to the US it was apparent that it was a very big deal,” she says. On the successful completion of that project, Malatji then applied to join another project with BMW UK, this time working on logistics material flow and supply chain. This was around peak Brexit, with the company trying to figure ways to optimise its supply chain — particularly routes and truck loads —in case the borders shut down. “There was a lot of innovation, there was space for innovation, space for free thinking,” she says. The objective of the project Malatji worked on during her stint with BMW UK involved making £1-million in savings per year. Within six months the South African engineer had
