A section of participants at the conference
Gold Fields Ghana Limited, a mining company in the Western Region spent about $896 million last year to procure goods and services and over 90 per cent of the amount went to in-country suppliers.
The local suppliers constituted almost 70 percent of the mining company’s 1,600 active suppliers.
Vice President and Head of Finance at Gold Fields West Africa, Lindley Hassler Witbooi, revealed this at the opening of the 2023 Suppliers Conference of the company being held in Tarkwa.
It is on the theme, “The Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) Culture: An Imperative to Building a Resilient Supply Chain through Partnership”.
The two days conference, being attended by close to 300 suppliers and vendors of the company, is to create the platform for the participants to interact and explore possible ways of being innovative.
It also seeks to bring together all the company’s suppliers, vendors and contractors to share best practices.
Mr. Witbooi noted that as a major global gold producer, the company depends on its business partners to deliver products and services that are crucial to the company’s mining operations in the country.
“With such a large number of suppliers and enormous procurement budget, it is in order to gather all of our business partners, once in a while, to deliberate on issues of mutual concern,” he noted.
“We are also meeting to share ideas and best practices to navigate global supply chain challenges that directly impact our businesses, as well as learn new trends to improve our business processes”, he added.
Mr. Witbooi noted that the maiden edition of the conference was held in 2019 and that after listening to the participants’ constructive feedback, the company’s supply chain management team reviewed its supply chain strategy.
“I am pleased to inform you that we have restructured and improve aspects of our procurement, tender and payment procedures to ease the process and eliminate bottlenecks that burden our suppliers”, he emphasized.
Mr. Witbooi continued, “We have now implemented preferential payment terms for licensed Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises (SMEs) that have established offices in our host communities.”
“This means that host community SMEs who supply to us will receive payment within 10 to 15 days once they submit a valid invoice”, he added.
He also indicated that in line with the company’s commitment to ESG, the company is now deliberate about its dealings with businesses owned and led by women.
Head of Supply Chain–Gold Fields, Theophilus Otchere, noted that the conference is expected to help strengthen the good relationship between Gold Fields and its suppliers, and to ensure a mutual understanding of what they needed to offer.
Unit Manager, Contracts of Gold Fields Tarkwa Mine, Joshua Donkor, said processing goods and services of the right quality, quantity and specifications at the right time and from the right source was very important.
From Emmanuel Opoku, Tarkwa
