This has been a year of mixed fortunes as far as the Small Business Competitiveness Network is concerned.

An evaluation of our pilot benchmarking programme (the Small Business Competitiveness Club) revealed that a widespread benchmarking and evaluation programme would need extensive IT redevelopment of our reporting formats, and require considerable expertise and substantial development costs.

Through as series of network contacts we hosted a CNA Innovazione representative, based in Bologna (Italy), a division of the CNA organisation which has 78 000 members across all industry sectors in Italy, including approximately 6 500 companies in the clothing and textile sectors, based mainly in Northern Italy.

After a visit to Cape Town, we concluded an agreement with CNA Innovazione in October 2007 to become licensees of their Frame Benchmarking system for the SME sector, with full access to all their SME benchmarking tools. This was followed by a week’s training with two CNA facilitators, both in the theoretical and the practical assessments at SME operations in Cape Town, including textile, full manufacturers and CMT’s.

The CNA benchmarking tools have been extensively proven over a period of 12 years, offering the distinct advantage of accelerating our coverage on SME’s, with the possibility of benchmarking 250 firms in a year, rather than a 5 year period as originally envisioned.

The CNA system has been developed from benchmarking used for large companies, and have both qualitative and quantitative tools as part of their programmes. The qualitative Frame system tool is aimed at small businesses and does not reaqurie the existence of an accounting system and formal in-company performance measurements to apply. The assessment only takes 2-3 hours to complete, and coupled with fact that no formal quantitative information is required thereby reduces the barriers to participation by small and relatively informal businesses, substantially improves the productivity of completing the benchmark assessments.

Another benefit is the potential to compare the South African SME’s to their Italian equivalents in Italy, whereby relative strengths and weaknesses can be explored to provide better insights into improvement priorities.

The licensing of the technology and training of local facilitators introduced significant additional cost and some delay in starting the benchmarking activities. We were extremely fortunate that PGWC agreed to the change in programme activities, outputs and expenditure patterns, and that the Tshumisano Trust provided us with funding for the additional programme costs.

The first pilot of benchmarking totalled 37 SME companies, 27 were CMT’s, 9 design houses/full manufacturers, and one textile company. Based on the summary of the group’s relative strengths and weaknesses, a programme of network sessions is planned using lead companies and experts to provide direction to the SME’s on best practices in specifically identified areas of management or organisation performance.

The results were sent through to CLOTEX, and have been given to those companies. The documentation has been translated from the Italian version, and is very extensive with regard to the theory of the benchmark system, and the enterprise activities that it covers. The system generates the information automatically, and provides a number of graphs illustrating the relative strengths and weaknesses of each SME. The report needs to be explained to the specific SME by the facilitator.

There have been a number of difficulties that have delayed the implementation of the programme to a wider number of SME’s. One of the problems was accessing the Italian system, and when we resolved these problems, we discovered that the Italians now had two more benchmarks called Context and Index. It took us some time to work out that entry into the system was via the Context programme, for which we did not obtain all the necessary information from the SME’s. There are also a number of minor but more detailed technical issues which we are currently resolving with the Italians.

As a consequence, a 48 hour turnaround on benchmark results to the SME has not been possible, but is now a practical opportunity.

The other difficulty has been with the information pack given to the SME’s – while these might be eminently suitable in Italy, the presentation and sequence of the report-back pack is not ‘user friendly’ for South Africa and the managerial level of the local SME entrepreneurs. We have worked on a proposal that we will be sending to CNA – this involves a change in presentation, but not content, for the local SME’s that we believe will be very much more relevant and have much more impact on the small entrepreneur, including comparing the individual SME with the South African as well as the Italian equivalents.

It has also become very evident that much work needs to be done to help the SME upgrade their capabilities, and market their production capacity. CLOTEX will be addressing these gaps with pilot projects in the coming months so that we can develop interventions that are meaningfully advantageous to the SME sector in these industries.

The next six to twelve months should prove to be challenging for the SBCN and CLOTEX working together with CPUT Technology Station and our team of facilitators, mentors and trainers to upgrade and create learning organisations in clothing and textile manufacturing in the Western Cape as a pilot for this industry sector in South Africa.