InfoWave achieves Level 4 BEE Rating...

InfoWave has been awarded a level four contributor status from BEE Online in its first independent BEE rating. This status gives InfoWave’s customers 100% recognition of their procurement spend for BEE purposes.

One of InfoWave’s founding principles over a decade ago was employee equity participation that has resulted in almost 100% score  for its BEE ownership equity rating. “In 1996 only 25% of our employees were from target EE groups,” says Tiffany Dunsdon, CEO of InfoWave. “The figure has now grown to 65%”. “We’ve been transforming since inception because it’s the morally correct thing to do as a citizen of corporate South Africa,” says Dunsdon. “We also believe that, in the long term, it will protect our business by helping customer retention and being well positioned to win new customers and collaborate with partners. In that sense we believe that it has already benefited us.”

As an enterprise development initiative, InfoWave also supported a former employee, Sbu Shabalala, who started Adapt-IT in 2004 and recently won the SmartXchange ICT Company of the Year award. The two companies still enjoy a close working relationship. InfoWave retains a minority stake in Adapt-IT and provides essential back-office, technical, financial, and HR services to its 26 employees.
“We backed a very successful entrepreneur,” says Dunsdon. “We happened to have scored full BEE accreditation points for having done so and the relationship continues to be very successful for both parties.”

InfoWave’scorporate social investment is focused on education, primarily the Ebuta Junior Secondary School in which it has had long term involvement initiated by employees. InfoWave was involved in the KwaZulu-Natal ICT Empowerment Charter Working Group. InfoWave consistently applied the underlying philosophies which have since become the codes of good practice, in spite of constantly shifting measurement goalposts. The Department of Trade and Industry has finalised the BEE Codes of Good Practice but rating agencies have yet to be accredited. However, The Association of BEE Verification Agencies (ABVA) is the first independent national membership organisation that accredits qualifying BEE agencies.

“Although government has yet to accredit the agencies themselves, companies are keen to establish their BEE status so that they can provide the information to customers that need it for their own scorecards,” says Dunsdon. “In our case, a 100% accreditation means that every rand our customers spend with us counts towards their BEE scorecard.”

Because the scorecard recognition jumps in unequal steps, companies have a strong incentive to get on the ladder and improve their ratings. A level eight rating adds only 10% of customers’ spend toward their own BEE scorecard, level seven adds 50%, level six 60%, level five 80% and level four 100%. Dunsdon attributes InfoWave’s success to its long-term, strategic view that genuine transformation is a foundation of sustainability .

“We’ve been doing what we believe was right, not chasing metrics,” says Dunsdon. “We looked at trying to become truly representative over time and took no hasty decisions to scramble aboard the train at the last minute. We will continue to invest further in transformation, in particular in the domain of skills development where we can add value to both our employees and our customers.