ACDC Express Software Purchases and Digital Transformation Initiatives

Discover the latest software purchases and digital transformation initiatives being undertaken by ACDC Express and its business and technology executives. Each quarter our research team identifies on-prem and cloud applications that are being used by the 19 ACDC Express employees from the public (Press Releases, Customer References, Testimonials, Case Studies and Success Stories) and proprietary sources.

During our research, we have identified that ACDC Express has purchased the following applications: Google Workspace (Formerly Google G-Suite) for Collaboration in 2015, Hetzner for Application Hosting and Computing Services in 2013, Zoho SalesIQ for Chatbots and Conversational AI in 2020 and the related IT decision-makers and key stakeholders.

Our database provides customer insight and contextual information on which enterprise applications and software systems ACDC Express is running and its propensity to invest more and deepen its relationship with Google , Hetzner , Zoho Corp. or identify new suppliers as part of their overall Digital and IT transformation projects to stay competitive, fend off threats from disruptive forces, or comply with internal mandates to improve overall enterprise efficiency.

We have been analyzing ACDC Express revenues, which have grown to $3.0 million in 2023, plus its IT budget and roadmap, cloud software purchases, aggregating massive amounts of data points that form the basis of our forecast assumptions for ACDC Express intention to invest in emerging technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, IoT, Blockchain, Autonomous Database or in cloud-based ERP, HCM, CRM, EPM, Procurement or Treasury applications.

About the Customer

ACDC Express is a retail extension of the well-established importer, manufacturer and distributor, ACDC Dynamics, and boasts a product range of over 70 000 individual items. Providing ample choices for all retail and industrial customers. These products are crucial in daily operations.

Scope and Challenges

The rapid expansion increases the demands on the ACDC Express central administration, which provides each franchise with IT support and a full suite of marketing, operational, and bookkeeping functions. So when email server downtime became a frequent problem, Ricardo and his team chose G Suite to transform the way the franchise worked.

“On consecutive occasions, our entire email server went down. It would take more than one or two days to bring it back up. We had already highlighted software cost overhead as a potential thing to reduce, so when that happened several times within a short period, we knew it was time to make a change.” -  Said Ricardo Maio, CEO ACDC Express. “We lost revenue when our email servers went down. When I researched Google’s SLA of 99.9% uptime and experimented with G Suite on my private Gmail account, I could see the difference this technology could create.”

Franchise businesses undergoing rapid expansion must respond quickly to the demands of new stores. At ACDC Express, 33 staff run the national franchise, delivering core services and support to 29 franchises across the country. Key tasks, such as updating the operations manual, were hampered by a reliance on paper forms and mail services, while email servers experienced repeat failures, which compromised communication. By implementing new, cloud-based productivity tools, ACDC Express looked to cut down on slow and expensive practices and deliver an agile, reliable online communications platform. To do that, ACDC Express migrated its franchise to G Suite with Opennetworks. 

"Since moving to Gmail, ACDC Express reports that the problem of email server downtime is no longer existent for them, while with Google Drive, versioning problems have been resolved. Using surveys on Google Forms, ACDC Express quickly and easily collects data from stores and customers—whether they are in stores or on the road—and populates Google Sheets with the information." - Said Ricardo Maio, CEO, ACDC Express

Outcome and Implications

Today, ACDC Express operates 240 Google accounts, and information from the franchises’ marketing systems, research, operations, and accounting is fed back automatically to Google Sheets and Google Dashboard at the headquarters in Edenvale, Gauteng. By Ricardo’s estimation, the administrative team is now so effective with G Suite tools, it can achieve twice as much as it could without them.

Now, ACDC Express is looking to use Google Chromebooks in a new web-based point-of-sale system and considering moving its ERP onto Google Cloud Platform for greater stability, in another project with Opennetworks.

Quotes

“When we moved to G Suite, we did it all at once, with every employee changing at the same time. We took a band-aid approach, switching to the new tools as rapidly as possible. After six months of training, there have been no reported problems with G Suite at all.” -Said Ricardo Maio, CEO, ACDC Express