Umthombo Springs Business Plan — Implementation Roadmap

Site civils and building; source development and protection zone; water treatment plant; PET line and blow moulder; laboratory and utilities; SANS and…

Implementation Roadmap

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Figure 14. Implementation roadmap — Series A close to export scale.

Phase

Timing

Milestones

Series A build

Months 0–11

Site civils and building; source development and protection zone; water treatment plant; PET line and blow moulder; laboratory and utilities; SANS and Foodstuffs Act registration

Domestic launch

Months 11–20

First production; regional listings and hospitality accounts; contract packing fills idle line hours; HACCP embedded

Certify and prove

Months 14–24

FSSC 22000 certification programme; SADC export PET trials; distributor appointment; export trials repeated

Series B close

Month 24

Conditional on plant commissioned, listings secured, FSSC 22000 achieved and export trials repeated

Export scale

Months 24–56

Premium glass line; PET capacity uplift; halal and Gulf registration; China and Korea registration; first ORIGIN shipment; brand and trade investment

13.1 Critical dependencies

Dependency

Gates

Mitigation

Water use licence conditions

Everything

Licence held before Series A close; abstraction conservative relative to licensed volume

Plant commissioning to programme

First production and all downstream certification

COO has commissioned comparable lines; supplier installation and performance guarantees; contingency in Series A

SANS 1657 and premises registration

First domestic sale

Applications lodged during construction

Production record accumulation

FSSC 22000 certification

Domestic and contract-packing volume generates the record; cannot be accelerated with capital

FSSC 22000 certification

Series B milestone and export entry

Consultants appointed early; programme begins month 14

Halal certification and destination registration

Gulf and Asian shipments

Budgeted in Series B; multiple markets pursued in parallel

Series B close

Glass line, capacity uplift, export working capital

Milestones defined and dated; bridge arrangement to be confirmed

Analyst flagCertification sits on the critical path and cannot be compressed

The sequence is strictly ordered: commission the plant, produce, accumulate a production record, certify to FSSC 22000, obtain halal certification, register the product in each destination market, then ship. Each step depends on the one before it and several are controlled by third parties operating to their own timetables. The Plan is right to build the funding structure around this sequence rather than assume it away, and right to note that the Company cannot buy its way past it. The corollary, which the Plan does not draw out, is that any delay early in the sequence propagates through all of it, a three-month commissioning slip does not cost three months, it costs three months plus the requalification of every downstream dependency.