How to Track Economic Development Activity

Background

Gibela has committed to drive meaningful Economic Development (ED) throughout fulfilment of the PRASA project. In order to simplify the process of monitoring and reporting on ED across the project and its many suppliers, Gibela has developed a web-based application built on top of the industry-leading Mpowered BEEtoolkit platform.

This ED Monitoring and Reporting Tool is designed to make the process of tracking your ED progress as easy as possible.

Tracking ED

Tracking your ED progress will happen on a monthly basis. At the beginning of each month, you’ll be reminded to login to the BEEtoolkit and load your ED data for the previous month.

Once the ED team at Gibela has loaded your profile, you will receive an email with your BEEtoolkit login details. This email will invite you to access the BEEtoolkit to set your commitments and to begin tracking your ED activity.

Lets take a look at how you would go about reporting your ED activity. To access the BEEtoolkit, go to gibela.beetoolkit.co.za.

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be taken to your dashboard. On your dashboard you’ll notice a series of icons.

The top icons represent the tools that Gibela provides at no charge. The bottom row of icons are add-ons to the ED Monitoring and Reporting Tool that you can purchase from Mpowered to use for managing your BEE status.

ED activity is tracked in the ‘Scorecard Calculator’. The Scorecard Calculator takes your monthly ED data and runs analysis to determine your alignment to the PRASA Economic Development Scorecard. To begin tracking your ED, open the Scorecard Calculator by clicking on its icon.

Here you will notice a list of Scorecards. The system will automatically generate a blank scorecard for you each month. Each month you will be required to capture your ED activity for the previous month in the relevant PRASA scorecard.

Click on the latest scorecard to open to begin loading your ED data for a month.

The Scorecard opens to a page that summarises your submissions for current quarter.

Lets expand Job Creation by clicking on it to understand how this table works.

Once you have clicked on Job Creation, the tab will open and look similar to the following screen:

In the first column (red arrow) you’ll see the description of the commitment, in this case, the first commitment in Job Creation is ‘Jobs created for citizens’. The next 3 columns (blue, yellow and green arrows respectively) are your actual achievement for the 3 months of the current quarter for this commitment. In this case, 90% (blue arrow) of the jobs created in October were for citizens of South Africa. In November we managed to reach 92% (yellow arrow) and 0% (green arrow) for December, since we haven’t captured our December data yet.

In the next column (orange arrow), we see our actual achievement for the quarter as a whole. This percentage represents the combined figures for October, November and December.

In the following column (pink arrow) we see the quarterly commitment we’ve set, in this case we’ve committed to achieve 84.35% for the quarter ending in December.

Finally, the ‘% commitment achieved’ (black arrow) represents how much of our commitment we’ve actually met for the quarter in question. When this figure is lower than 100%, a red speech bubble (white arrow) will appear to the right, indicating that you should capture a comment on why there was a deficit.  When a comment has been captured, this speech bubble will turn green.

 The other tabs across the top of the Scorecard Calculator represent the different categories of data required for reporting.

Lets head over to Preferential Procurement to capture Economic Development activity for this element.

On the Preferential Procurement tab (and the other data tabs) you will be presented with screens that guide you through uploading ED data.

If you are ever unsure about what is required of you, be sure to check the ‘Help & Definitions’ (red arrow) available from the link it the top bar.  Preferential Procurement requires that we capture data about our supplier activity related to the PRASA project. For this month, we had a Total Measured Procurement Spend, related to this project, of R850,000. Lets fill that in (blue arrow) and hit Save.

Next, lets capture our suppliers and spend for the month. You can either do this by entering each supplier individually, by clicking on the ‘Add new suppliers individually’ button. Or you can do it en masse by using our spreadsheet template.

Lets click ‘from a spreadsheet’, to start the upload process. 

Now, we download the procurement template, open it in Excel and fill it in.

We had only one supplier, on whom we spent R450,000 (blue arrow). The supplier has a level 1 BEE scorecard (red arrow).

Lets upload the supplier into the system. Click ‘choose file’ and then upload.

You’ll see that the supplier appears (red arrow), along with the adjusted spend (blue arrow) for the supplier.

We can now head over to the summary tab again.

We now expand the Preferential Procurement element.

Once expanded, we can see that we now have 71.47% (red arrow) as an actual achievement for this month. Combined with our previous months, our quarterly achievement is 576.63% (blue arrow), putting us above our quarterly commitment.

Conclusion

And there you have it. Each month you will be required to upload data into the system that will then aggregate your contributions and present your performance for the month, and the quarter. All of this will help you track your progress in real-time and help you ensure that you meet your commitments.

If you have any questions, please email us on: economicdevelopment@gibela-rail.com