With broad-based empowerment partners Africom and Sekunjalo each holding 13% of Siemens Southern Africa, this pioneering move has been complimented with an active diversity management programme covering race, culture and gender issues; preferential procurement policies augmented by a supplier development programme that encourages the growth and development of black-owned companies and employment equity.

As the first South African to head the local Siemens operation that covers most of sub-Saharan Africa, Siemens Southern Africa sees empowerment as a business imperative aimed at ensuring that previously disadvantaged groups are able to derive greater benefit from participation in the economic mainstream. Preferential procurement also ensures that more than half the goods and services bought by the company are from black-owned and empowered enterprises, many of which are small to medium sized business, a business area that holds the most promise in terms of job creation.

Siemens Southern Africa has a long track record of working together with black-owned businesses when bidding for government tenders. An example of this is the organisation’s participation in the Impilo consortium to equip, manage and run the Albert Luthuli Central Hospital in KwaZulu-Natal – the first public private partnership (PPP) of its kind in the healthcare sector and one that could set a trend on partnerships between the government and the private sector in delivering services to the people of South Africa.

Siemens Business Services, together with its empowerment partner Sifikile, has won several lucrative outsourcing contracts with government, including PetroSA and the ten year, R1,25-billion PPP with the Department of Labour. The partnership with Sifikile is crucial, as the organisation plays an active role in strategic operations as well as overseeing the delivery of most of the company’s procurement services, with more than 50% of this sourced from black-owned companies.

In spite of the fact Siemens Southern Africa employs more than 3,000 people locally, robust economic growth and increased infrastructure spending could result in a shortage of skills, a factor already identified by government and industry as a limitation to national growth and development. To meet the need for skilled staff, Siemens provides on-going opportunities for staff to acquire and upgrade their skills through in-house or external training programmes, and as a multinational company, allows for local staff to be deployed in Siemens operations across the globe.

Given the tremendous size of the group and its many operating divisions encompassing everything from steam and gas turbines for electricity generation, instrumentation and control systems used in many of the country’s power stations through to X-ray machines and PABXs, one strategy employed by the organisation to promote its wide range of diverse offerings is ‘Siemens One’, an approach that aims to exploit cross-selling opportunities across several key clients.

As a multinational, Siemens’ corporate social responsibility programmes are implemented by the group’s operations at a local level, where each subsidiary determines how allocated funds should be spent.