You are Naledi Mokoena, Chief Information Officer of Sentinel Logistics in Johannesburg. A ZAR 180 million workforce system goes live nationally in six weeks, the union has given you ten working days, and on Monday the executive team expects to hear how you describe what the company has bought.
The situation
Sentinel moves freight for clients who care above all about on-time delivery: nine distribution centres, 640 trucks and 4,800 people, about 3,900 of them on the warehouse floor or behind the wheel. Last year it turned over about ZAR 7.2 billion at a margin near 6%. The new system, WOMS, allocates warehouse work, reads the trucks' telematics and, through a people-analytics module, scores each worker's productivity and behaviour in real time.
The board approved WOMS on the promise of a ZAR 95 million annual efficiency gain. Two weeks ago the Johannesburg pilot leaked, and every centre now knows about the individual scores and that someone in a management meeting said "right-sizing". The latest survey says only 38% of frontline staff are willing to use the system as designed. The union is threatening a formal dispute, a journalist is asking how the system decides whom to flag, and compliance with POPIA, South Africa's data-protection law, has barely started.
Switching WOMS off is not on the table: the money is spent and the pilot is running. You have ZAR 25 million for training, transparency and safeguards, none of it committed. Around the executive table the same purchase already goes by several names: an IT integration, a tool that simply coordinates work, a cost programme, a change in how managers and workers see each other. Whichever one you put in Monday's paper becomes the starting point for everything else.