Abstract
M.Phil. (Engineering Management)
Engineering Consultants play a very important role in the delivery of infrastructure
projects in South Africa. Infrastructure spend constitutes a significant percentage of the
total South African national treasury spend every year, with government institutions and
state owned entities being the biggest spenders. Small, Medium and Micro-Sized
Enterprises (SMMEs) are seen as large contributors to employment and economic
growth in the country, yet these entities seem to be restricted in growth and
development.
The study identified the challenges affecting the engineering consulting industry in
South Africa. Various organisations governing and supporting the engineering
consulting industry have been identified and the challenges experienced by
engineering consultants through research was obtained. Further to this, challenges
faced by SMMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa were also researched to determine the
commonality in challenges. The study identified four key challenges, the impact of
which was investigated against SMME engineering consultants in South Africa. These
four challenges are namely, access to finance, the management of change order
requests by government entities, the scoping of work by government entities and
procurement of consulting engineering services by state owned organisations.
These four challenges were routed to SMME engineering consulting firms through a
survey questionaire. The respondents comprised both SMME firms and Large firms.
The criterion used to differentiate SMME firms from Large firms was the firms annual
turnover. The findings from SMME firms attested that in order of ranking: access to
finance ranked as having the highest negative effect on their businesses, followed by
the management of change order requests, then poor scope definition and lastly
procurement of consulting engineering services by public sector clients. Large firms
concurred with this order of ranking.
The conclusions drawn from the findings were that public sector clients were largely
responsible for the challenges experienced by the SMME firms. Access to finance
requires interventions by both government and private banking instutions to assist
SMME firms with applications and obtaining loans and grants. Management of change
order requests, scoping challenges and procurement of consulting engineering
services requires government interventions to address inefficiences in public sector
entities to enable the effective growth and development of SMMEs in South Africa.