Nyamezela Metering takes home FOTY category award

The Factory of the Year (FOTY) award, a global benchmarking competition run by A.T. Kearney, awarded Nyamezela Metering the 2019 Excellence in Small Scale Production.

Matsotso Vuso, MD of Nyamezela Metering, said: “We are honoured to receive this recognition of our commitment to continuously improve through receiving this award in the category ‘Excellence in Small Scale Production’. This Factory of the Year category award is an affirmation to our management, staff and strategic partners that we are on the path to becoming a world-class manufacturer of world-class products.”

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Having stood shoulder to shoulder with world class producers and blue-chip companies, “makes us even more proud to receive this award,” said Vuso.

The panel of judges from the Department of Trade and Industry, Manufacturing Circle, Council the Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Lean Institute Africa judged the finalists across five key dimensions: customer satisfaction, quality, value creation, economics and agility.

How did Nyamezela achieve excellence?

The Nyamezela team is very young, dynamic and passionate. In order to achieve excellence, the company invested in training and upskilling employees through various programmes including an elaborate exchange programme with the firm’s highly experienced technical partner, Inhemeter, which is itself a world class manufacturer.

“Today we can boast of a team and a factory that produces high-quality products as evidenced by our almost non-existent defectives and/or returns,” said Vuso.

According to Vuso, in South Africa, black-established industrialisation will achieve economic transformation, reduction of inequality and eradication of poverty through the inclusion of previously disadvantaged populations into the mainstream economy.

“This award is testament and evidence that black industrialists can indeed attain world-class standards in manufacturing. Our factory employs 45 technicians from rural areas and TVET colleges nationally. The real winners are these young people and all the staff at Nyamezela Metering.”

“We wish to urge the various agencies of government to continue to promote and support ‘hands-on’ black industrialists through such initiatives as the DTI’s Black Industrialisation Scheme,” she concluded.