Logistical innovation: Renier Du Preez

When it comes to getting things from A to B, companies must ensure their supply chains are efficient and reliable, with products required in precise locations in accordance to the strictest of deadlines. Without an effective logistics provider to oversee the process, missed sales opportunities and client disappointment are inevitable, leading to a drop in profits and brand approval.

Innovative South African supply chain and distribution operations company Digistics has been serving its customers in the African nation for more than 24 years with reliable supply chain execution and collaboration, driven solely by the needs of its clients.

And they do this with a sharp eye on efficiency and ingenuity, by implementing the latest technologies to save time, money and resources.

"It’s about innovation and how to link that up, which allows us to offer the lowest cost to serve, but the highest reliability, with some of the best technology that you can get," Renier Du Preez, CEO at Digistics, tells The CEO Magazine.

"It’s the ability to put those things together that, I believe, is what makes logistics unique. In everything that we do, our vision is to ensure a perfect delivery."

Innovative ingenuity

In a country like South Africa, where the infrastructure can be unpredictable and the climate harsh, there are many logistical challenges to overcome. But for Digistics, these challenges are inventively and preemptively turned into opportunities to serve their clients’ needs.

"We were one of the first logistics companies in the quick serve restaurant market to implement generators at our logistics facilities. We knew that should something happen, our customers will only rely on the product that’s sitting at our distribution centers," he says.

"So six years ago we kitted out all our facilities with generators, and so when electricity load-shedding really started in South Africa, we were ready for it."

The country’s unreliable power supply also generated exciting new ways for the company to serve its clients. It added solar power to its operations to offer customers more reliable power alternatives and cost reduction while also benefiting the environment with effective sustainability initiatives.

This has also involved developing an oils business component, where the company collects used cooking oil and converts it into biodiesel.

"The idea isn’t just good for the environment from a sustainability perspective, it also reduces cost to serve for all stakeholders in our supply chain," he explains.

"It creates our own contingency, so should the company suddenly have a problem where we are short supplied on diesel, we can easily go to a blend of 20 percent and have 100 percent of our demand on diesel to serve our customers.

"This has created a competitive advantage for our clients that distribute through Digistics, but also a competitive advantage for us over other logistics companies that don’t have access to their own diesel in the form of biodiesel."

Challenges as opportunities

This ingenuity has proven enormously successful through some of the world’s biggest challenges over recent decades, most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, characteristically, Du Preez has shown that when faced with a challenge, there is always an opportunity for ingenuity.

It was as a young man, when Du Preez did his necessary military service with the South African Army, that he says he discovered his passion for logistics. He later went on to work in the Woolworths distribution center for 12 years in pursuit of his passion.

"I saw the logistics industry as exciting in that there’s never a day that something is the same," he says.

"The ability to put processes, technology and people together and see the end result just resonated with me. From a very young age, I realized I wanted to run a logistics company one day."

This opportunity presented itself to Du Preez when his then employer, Woolworths, was given the chance to take on a logistics business proposal for a large brand but declined.

"I was then approached to develop Digistics with five other partners," he says. "It was an opportunity for me to own a piece of a logistics business, and it was just what I was looking for at the time."

Since then, the company has experienced phenomenal growth and change, and achieved significant results for an impressive number of multinational and local companies in South Africa.

"In South Africa, we can complain about the conditions and what’s happening around us. But we made the decision, specifically coming out of the pandemic, that we’ll no longer complain about our environment. We’ll just show resilience and say, ‘Well, how do we work within that?’" he says.

"We said, ‘let’s stop complaining about our reality and do something about it’. So that’s what we did."