Research shows that B-BBEE compliance does not increase a company’s business risk over the long term. That raises an important consideration. If meeting B-BBEE criteria doesn’t increase risk, then, from a strategic point of view, managing B-BBEE becomes less about mitigating risk and, potentially, about unlocking opportunity. It’s a conceptual paradigm shift that has important implications for business planning.

Upskill your staff

The obvious place to start if you want to maximise the opportunities that B-BBEE affords is right at home, with the company’s own workforce. 

The Skills Development element of the B-BBEE scorecard enables you to enhance your score by training your employees.

Enhancing your employee’s skills as part of your larger programme of B-BBEE compliance is the ultimate win-win. It’s good for your staff, equipping them to be more competitive and opening new opportunities. It’s good for the company, helping staff retention and improving efficiency. And it’s good for your B-BBEE scorecard.

Which shouldn’t really be surprising. After all, B-BBEE wasn’t designed to penalise companies; it’s supposed to produce a more productive business environment. 

Of course, not all training programmes are equal. Meeting both criteria – enhancing your B-BBEE scorecard as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible and providing employees with genuine skills that actually enhance productivity – takes careful planning and experience. 

Upgrade your supply chain: reciprocity in action

The Enterprise and Supplier Development (ESD) element of the B-BBEE scorecard enables businesses to improve the quality of their supply chain while directly assisting smaller businesses. 

By providing eligible businesses within your supply chain with the critical skills and resources they need to drive growth, you not only create a more robust business environment overall, you help them to provide you with a better standard of goods and services. Implemented optimally, supplier development can be deployed to develop profound mutually beneficial relationships. 

Of course, supplier development initiatives need to be carefully planned and implemented in order to produce impactful and sustainable results. 

That’s why BEE123’s supplier development solution is laser focused on identifying the appropriate beneficiaries within your supply chain and developing customised interventions that will help address each beneficiary’s real world business needs. 

Create opportunities for new business

When we turn to the paradigm of B-BBEE as opportunity rather than risk, we can also conceptualise reciprocity as more than a one-way street. 

For instance, you may work diligently to include more B-BBEE compliant businesses into your supply chain. But in turn, the resulting improvements to your B-BBEE scorecard also place your business in a position to secure more business by in turn acting as a supplier to other companies seeking to boost their own scorecards. 

Not to mention that with tighter B-BBEE rules coming, compliance will become even more important for securing government contracts.

An opportunity to make a difference

So far we have considered opportunities B-BBEE affords through enhancing your immediate business environment. 

However, B-BBEE regulations were designed to produce a broad socio-economic impact, leveraging the efficiency and resources of South Africa’s dynamic private sector. 

Whether it’s equipping young people with the skills they need to find employment, or helping small businesses meet the demands of the modern economy, or providing resources to organisations that help produce social uplift, there’s a common connecting thread. In each case, these initiatives follow from the guiding principles of B-BBEE, which were designed to bring business, government and civil society together to meet the country’s most urgent social needs.  

Technology meets strategy

In principle, then, B-BBEE offers clear, pinpointed and wide-ranging opportunities to help businesses realise their goals and make a real difference. In practice, the reality is often quite different. Businesses get so bogged down in the administrative burden of compliance that they lose sight of the big picture. 

BEE123 B-BBEE Management Software represents a digital paradigm shift in how B-BBEE compliance is managed. The powerful custom-developed technology makes it much simpler and faster to plan, manage and implement B-BBEE initiatives, enabling you to focus on driving a strategy that produces real value.

Equally important, BEE123 provides an integrated advisory service to help you conceptualise a highly impactful B-BBEE strategy and ensure you bring it to fruition. 

Get in touch with BEE123 to turn theory into concrete action.