Business Engineering

12/06/2026

At Business Engineering, Collaborator and we are extremely proud of our valued team member and colleague, Sphamandla Goqo, on achieving his Bachelor of Accounting Sciences degree.

Congratulations, Spa! Your dedication and perseverance have paid off.

We celebrate this outstanding achievement and wish you continued success. 🎓👏

12/06/2026

Business Engineering is proud to be part of Drakenstein Municipality's digital transformation journey. Dr Johan Leibbrandt and his team are a testament to what strong leadership and the right systems can achieve together. Seeing Collaborator play a role in digitising core governance functions at one of South Africa's best-run municipalities is exactly what this work is about.

Eleven clean audits. South Africa's best secondary city. The Western Cape's best municipality. Drakenstein doesn't talk about good governance - they just do it, year after year. In this episode, City Manager Dr. Johan Leibbrandt unpacks the leadership, disciplines and culture that mak...

10/06/2026

Business Engineering is proud to partner with Overstrand Municipality on their digital transformation journey, working together to deliver innovative solutions that enhance service delivery and community engagement with Collaborator

Overstrand Municipality's digital transformation didn't start with ...

08/06/2026

Mornay Viljoen, CEO of Express Broadband Technologies (EBT) - now part of the Business Engineering group - unpack how modern residential load management technology is transforming the way municipalities manage electricity demand and costs.

The conversation begins with context: municipalities buy electricity from Eskom at time-of-use rates, paying up to R6.80 per kilowatt hour during peak periods while selling to residents at roughly R3.80 - a built-in loss for five hours every day. The old ripple control systems addressed this bluntly, switching geysers and pool pumps off en masse, with no visibility, no device-level data and no ability to manage reconnection. The result was demand spikes, infrastructure trips and call centre overload.

EBT's Spark device changes this fundamentally. Installed at the geyser, it gives municipalities device-level visibility and bidirectional communication, while giving residents control through the Collaborator Citizen App - setting schedules, managing holiday periods and monitoring consumption from their phones. The device is SABS-approved, software-updatable, and designed for a 10 to 15 year lifespan. Capital costs are recoverable within three years.

Eskom actively supports the technology, subsidising deployments at R3 million per megawatt shifted from peak to off-peak - provided the municipality is in good standing with Eskom and measurement is independently verified.

The longer-term opportunity is bigger: the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act (active from January 2025) is unbundling Eskom and liberalising the energy market, allowing municipalities to buy from independent power producers. The municipalities that invest in grid intelligence now will be positioned to trade electricity across multiple suppliers in real time - a fundamental shift in how municipal energy management works.

Philip de Bruin, Managing Director of Business Engineering, is join...

05/06/2026

The systems that make municipal finance work.

95% revenue collection. Staff costs below 35% of budget. Repairs and maintenance funded at 8% of asset base. Three ratios. The difference between a municipality that works and one that doesn't.

Issue #4 of The Municipal Brief unpacks the model - and exactly what the systems layer behind it needs to deliver.

Business Engineering's - phoenixerp.co.za - Proud to support this edition. Read it here 👇

Issue #4 of The Municipal Brief is out: https://mailchi.mp/futurecitiesafrica/the-maths-behind-municipal-failure-and-the-model-to-fix-it

Anton Groenewald - former Municipal Manager of both Midvaal Local Municipality and Swellendam Municipality, now Group Head of Regional Operations at the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality - has written the model for fixing local government finance. In this issue we unpack it.

R467 billion in unpaid municipal debt. Only 41 clean audits. Municipalities collecting 69 cents in every budgeted rand. The benchmarks that separate the municipalities that work from those that don't are known. So is who is accountable.

04/06/2026

Anton Groenewald's framework - collect your revenue, protect your assets, fund your maintenance, appoint capable people - is exactly the kind of clarity the sector needs right now.

At Business Engineering, we built around the same logic: that financial sustainability isn't a theory, it's a discipline, and it only works when your systems enforce it in real time.

Proud to put our name behind this one.

Visit: https://www.phoenixerp.co.za/

Drawing on a paper he wrote titled 'The Logic of Local Government Finance', Anton Groenewald, Group Head of Regional Operations at the City of Tshwane, delivers one of the most direct and substantive accounts of why South African municipalities are failing - and exactly what it takes to fi...

25/05/2026

It was such a privilege to work with Future Cities Africa and Bergrivier Municipality on this very special feature with & Collaborator

Bergrivier Municipality is one of South Africa's most recognised and best-run local authorities. Municipal Manager Advocate Hanlie Linde unpacks what actually makes it work - from governance and digital transformation to an extraordinary Belgian twin city partnership.

22/05/2026

Proud to have sponsored this important conversation as Platinum Sponsor. Well done to Leanne Botha for representing the Business Engineering team, and to Future Cities Africa and The Municipal Edge for curating such a relevant and practical session. The appetite for digital transformation in local government is real - and we are here for it.

Future Cities Africa and the Municipal Edge present the 5th Annual "Local Government Conversations" Webinar Series.

22/05/2026

Issue #3 of The Municipal Brief by Future Cities Africa is out: https://mailchi.mp/futurecitiesafrica/the-local-government-performance-gap-and-how-to-close-it

This edition asks a simple question: George Municipality has five consecutive clean audits, operating under the same laws as every other municipality in South Africa. What are they doing differently?

The answer is not unique to George. Kenya's 47-county devolution model, now 16 years in, and Rwanda's IremboGov platform - which cut service delivery costs by 77.5% and pushed Kigali to 101.9% of its own revenue targets in 2024/25 - point to the same pattern. The gap between high-performing and underperforming local government is almost never a legislation gap. It is a systems and capability gap.

Thanks to Business Engineering for sponsoring this edition.
Subscribe to The Municipal Brief: http://eepurl.com/ikZ-Uz

21/05/2026

We are excited to introduce the panel joining us for webinar: Restructuring Powers and Functions: Expanded Role of Local Government

Date: 22 May at 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Register Here: https://futurecitiesafrica.com/webinar/76/restructuring-powers-and-functions-expanded-role-of-local-government
CPD accredited: by CIGFARO for up to 2 CPD points
Platinum Sponsor: Business Engineering

Meet the Panel:
Prof Jaap De Visser: National Research Chair in Multilevel Government, Dullah Omar Institute
Mr Anton Groenewald: Group Head Regional Operations, City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality
Mr Nkosinathi September: Senior Advisor: Financial Resilience, South African Local Government Association
Moderator: Mr Zolani Zonyane, PSExec(SA): Editorial Director, Webinar Curator Moderator, The Municipal Edge
Host: Mr Daniel Claassen: MD, Future Cities Africa

This session tackles one of the most consequential questions in the current reform agenda - whether municipalities have the right powers, the right mandates, and the right funding to deliver. With the 2026 White Paper now gazetted, the conversation moves from vision to implementation.