EOH Holdings chief financial officer Megan Pydigadu clearly relishes a challenge. She is leaving the IT services group to become chief operating officer at retailer Spar.

Earlier this week, EOH announced to its shareholders that Pydigadu had resigned and would leave the group at the end of October. In a statement, EOH said Pydigadu was “taking up a position at a large South African company”.

Spar has now revealed in a statement to its shareholders that Pydigadu, 48, will take on the newly created role of COO of the troubled retailer. Her appointment comes as Spar also announced a new CEO, company insider Angelo Swartz, 41, who will replace Mike Bosman in the role from 1 October. Pydigadu will join Spar on 1 November, after wrapping up her responsibilities at EOH.

Both Swartz and Pydigadu will be appointed as executive directors of Spar, too.

On the newly created COO role, Spar said the position will “strengthen the group’s executive team and provide support to the CEO on the co-ordination and oversight of the operational and functional activities of the group as well as retailer profitability”.

“Pydigadu brings her extensive restructuring, operational and change management experience to the new role and will add valuable bench strength to the Spar Group executive team,” the retailer said. “She is a respected business leader who is highly experienced in corporate restructuring, governance and delivering operating efficiencies.”

She joined EOH as group finance director in January 2019 and has worked closely with CEO Stephen van Coller to rescue the IT services group, which became embroiled in a corruption scandal. Her duties included overseeing legal, financial, human resources, IT, communications, investor relations and business support digitisation.

SAP project

The appointments at Spar come as the retailer fights fires on several fronts. This includes a botched SAP project at its distribution centre in KwaZulu-Natal that cost it R786-million in lost wholesale turnover in the six months to end-March 2023.

Spar said in June, when it published its interim results, that it was facing a double-digit decline in profit and had deemed in “prudent” not to declare an interim dividend as a result. The group blamed high interest rates, load shedding, difficulties in implement the SAP system and rising costs for the weak numbers.

Its operating profit fell almost 18% to about R1.5-billion, while its diluted headline earnings per share fell more than 30% because of cost pressures, which led to a subsequent loss of turnover. Finance costs on debt and overdrafts also increased, and the group said that over the past 12 months, all regions had come under considerable inflationary cost pressures.

Read: Botched SAP project costs Spar R786-million

Spar said the SAP problems were being resolved with the assistance of SAP specialists and that operational performance was improving. “The various go-live issues are being resolved and the priority remains to improve order fulfilment to ensure more predictable and consistent supply to retailers. The roll-out of SAP has been delayed in other regions until all issues at the KZN DC have been completely and satisfactorily resolved.” — © 2023 NewsCentral Media