If You Run Your Country’s Largest Retail Franchise, How Do You Pull Together, in Sync?
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In 1984, Mario Maio set up a small business manufacturing electrical transformers in his Johannesburg garage. Over the next two decades, the ACDC Dynamics company he created came to dominate manufacturing, import, and distribution in South Africa’s electrical goods sector. Then, in 2007, Mario’s son, Ricardo Maio, founded a retail arm to the business, ACDC Express. Today ACDC Express is South Africa’s largest electrical retail franchise, with 29 franchise stores across the country. Eight of those franchises joined in 2017 alone, and ACDC Express is experiencing quarter-on-quarter growth of 28% per year.
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.
“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.”
Ricardo Maio, CEO, ACDC Express
“On consecutive occasions, our entire email server went down,” says Ricardo Maio, CEO at ACDC Express. “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.”
Building a better franchise
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 practises, and deliver an agile, reliable online communications platform.
To do that, ACDC Express migrated its franchise to G Suite with Opennetworks. “We lost revenue when our email servers went down,” says Ricardo. “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.”
Since moving to Gmail, ACDC Express reports that the problem of email server downtime “is no longer existent for us,” 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.
“Our operations manual is a binding document, and it’s a living document that gets regularly updated. In the past, we would struggle to track which franchise had which version. With Google Drive, we can be sure that everyone is looking at the right one.”
Ricardo Maio, CEO, ACDC Express
With Google Data Studio, the managing team then consolidates that data on dashboards, creating snapshots of performance, complete with averages and simple comparisons, which make it easy to spot issues and outliers in need of attention. Individual businesses that do require help are then contacted over Google Hangouts Meet to assess what they need, part of a culture of sharing expertise, which Ricardo sees as key to the franchise mode.
“As a franchise, sharing knowledge is as important as maintaining control,” he says. “If there’s a new procedure or system that worked in one store, we can immediately update our manuals and documentation so that everyone has access to it. That’s been fantastic.”
“Our operations manual is a binding document, and it’s a living document, which gets regularly updated,” says Ricardo. “In the past, we would struggle to track which franchise had which version, and every time we had to make a change we would print out a version and send it to stores through an unreliable postal service. With Google Drive, we can be sure that everyone is looking at the right one.”
Remote training, rapid migration
Rolling out new IT tools across a franchise is often expensive, demanding extensive travel and numerous training sessions, which often repeat the same material. Instead, ACDC Express set up training on Google Hangouts that staff could drop into at their convenience, creating a cost-effective training schedule, which meant individual stores could plan their own learning process.
“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.”
Ricardo Maio, CEO, ACDC Express
“The whole benefit of franchising is that you can learn from your peers,” says Ricardo. “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.”
More mobile, more reliable
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.
“We’ve developed an in-house point of sale system that’s web-based and can use a functional touchscreen,” adds Ricardo. “We’re looking at rolling that out with Google Chromebooks. We really like how straightforward and simple the Google Chrome devices are, and because we’ve taken a lot of infrastructure into the cloud, we no longer actually need physical machines on our counters. We can work anywhere. That’s something that applies from our head office right down to our smallest franchise store.”
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How G Suite Makes it Easy to Work with Microsoft Office and Exchange
A silent transformation is taking shape in organizations today. Employees are looking for new ways to discover new ideas, and work together anytime, anywhere to ensure businesses are always on.
Without IT’s help that’s not possible. And to make this possible IT teams are working over-time to ensure seamless collaboration by integrating disparate systems. But what happens when IT teams have to marry Microsoft tools with Google?
With G Suite, IT managers don’t have to bother. G Suite interoperates with Microsoft tools. Its multiple features create a more seamless experience between G Suite and Office—including support for user and resource availability lookups between Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange, as well as the ability to seamlessly collaborate on Microsoft Office documents in real time.
This interoperability ensures that these two tools are designed to work together. There are three pillars that are necessary for interoperability. One, data needs to move from on-premise to the cloud. Two, ensure internal co-existence where some users use Microsoft tools, while others run on G Suite. This interoperability is important to ensure both sets of users can work together irrespective of the tools they are using.
And three, collaborating with external parties that use Microsoft tools—external co-existence—is also
The Tech Behind Goibibo’s Amazing Collaboration Tool That Employees Love
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Founded in 2007 and entering the travel market in 2009, Goibibo has grown to support 21 million users, 98% of whom are based in India. “We
Goibibo started with two engineers and three business managers—a workforce that has grown to 200 engineers and about 300 business managers, including a large business development team. “Our business development managers are integral to our growth, as they help build relationships with partners such as hotels,”Sahni says
Goibibo prides itself on a culture of fast-paced development and innovation. However, it had initially elected to run traditional workforce productivity applications on in-house servers. These applications forced team members who needed input into proposals, presentations, spreadsheets, and other business documents to send out drafts, and then aggregate and consolidate feedback from multiple sources.
This process was not just time-consuming, but vulnerable to version control problems as several versions of the same document could be in circulation throughout the business.
Furthermore, Goibibo had to expend considerable time and resources maintaining and upgrading hardware, software, and associated facilities. This ate into the technology team’s ability to improve the features and functionality of the company’s websites and applications.
Ease Your Migration and Modernization Journey with Microsoft and Windows on Google Cloud Demo Center
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If you’re looking to migrate and modernize your Microsoft and Windows workloads, Google Cloud is your premiere destination. No matter what migration strategy you’ve selected or what value you’re looking to achieve, with Google Cloud you’re able to:
- simplify your migration and modernization journey
- reduce your on-prem footprint and increase agility
- optimize license usage to reduce costs
- modernize to reduce single-vendor dependencies
- rely on enterprise-class support backed by Microsoft
Whether you’re looking to migrate applications running on Windows virtual machines, adopt Windows containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), convert SQL databases to Cloud SQL, or something else, Google Cloud offers you the first-class experience you need.
But we don’t want you to take our word for it. Try it out yourself with our new online Microsoft and Windows on Google Cloud Demo Center without any commitment or friction.
The demo center uses hands-on guided simulations to walk you through several scenarios for solving business critical challenges with Google Cloud’s Microsoft and Windows solutions. Because these are all simulated, you’ll see how it works without any deployment, configuration, or commitment. It’s a seamless way for you to see exactly how Google Cloud can help you.
Run dedicated hardware and optimize with sole tenant
Sometimes you might want to run your workloads on dedicated hardware (with oversubscription options) for compliance, licensing, and management. Google Cloud provides sole-tenant nodes that allow you to easily deploy your virtual machines onto dedicated machines to avoid “noisy neighbor” issues, address regulatory or licensing constraints, and optimize inter-VM communications.
Plus, the CPU Overcommit option allows oversubscribing sole-tenant node resources by up to 2x, therefore helping save on per-physical core licensing for many licensed workloads like SQL Server.
Learn how to set up a sole tenant group and node.
Optimize license costs with premium images & custom VMs
One of the easiest ways to optimize your cloud experience with virtual machines (VM) is to pick the right VM image. Google Cloud provides premium license-included VM images that are thoroughly tested and optimized, including SQL Server options with pay-as-you-go licensing. These are great for workloads that don’t need to run all the time or when you do not have spare licenses for bring your own license (BYOL).
Explore some Windows & SQL images and learn how CPU/Memory options can help optimize deployment and save on licensing.
Modernize your databases with Managed SQL Server
Sometimes you need to manage your SQL Server instance to achieve certain business or operational goals. But more often, managing SQL Server deployments can be undifferentiated: backups, high-availability, updates, and patching are just some of the many things you have to take care of when going the do-it-yourself route. One way to modernize your database tier is to migrate to a managed service like Cloud SQL, which is a fully managed Relational Database service for SQL.
Explore the process of creating an instance in just a few clicks!
Extract apps from VMs and move to containers in GKE with Migrate for Anthos
Many Windows workloads running on virtual machines such as Internet Information Services (IIS) are ideal candidates for migrating to containers without major changes like rewriting or rearchitecting. However, doing this migration manually can be tedious, which is why Migrate for Anthos can help easily re-platform a .NET app running on IIS into a container-based app.
Simulate intelligently extracting, migrating, and modernizing applications to run natively on containers in GKE and Anthos clusters.
Move .NET applications to GKE on Windows without code changes
When you’re looking to go fully cloud native, you can leverage Windows containers in GKE without rewriting your .NET applications. Simply create clusters with Windows nodes and deploy containerized Windows workloads in a few clicks, even alongside Linux containers. These deployments reduce operational overhead with features such as auto-upgrade, auto-repair, and release channels.
Learn how easy it is to build a GKE cluster with a Windows node and deploy an app.
Now that you’ve gotten a feel for what’s available, go check out the Demo Center. You can also visit us at Windows and Microsoft on Google Cloud to learn more.
Arab Bank Accelerates its App Development and Testing Using Apigee and Anthos
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Founded in 1930 and headquartered in Jordan, Arab Bank is one of the oldest banks in the Middle East. Operating out of 28 countries, we’ve earned our customers’ trust with a prudent approach to operations and respect for the cultures and customs in the region.
With a few exceptions where cloud providers have hosted their datacenter in a Middle Eastern or North African country, the banking sector, in general, in the region has been slow to adopt cloud technology for a number of reasons, including concern about data security, maturity and security controls of cloud services (PaaS and SaaS), and regulations in place. But on the other hand, we saw the opportunity to accelerate our development and testing using the cloud, as well as to partner with the fintech community and digital service providers to integrate their solution in the banking ecosystem. We needed more flexibility to connect with the outside world, and a more open architecture to help us drive our internal innovation at a faster rate with the help of the fintech industry. By collaborating with Google Cloud, we reached those goals and accelerated app development and testing through products like Apigee and Anthos. We’re now offering innovative apps and services to our customers and employees that leverage new technological capabilities to give more agility and flexibility, and to optimize our workloads.
Embracing the cloud in a regulated industry
To get started with the cloud, we needed to create internal awareness about cloud technology, the API layer, containers and their benefits amongst our leaders and staff. Google helped us educate and get buy-in from key functions by organizing open technology demonstration sessions and discussion panels. When considering potential cloud providers we had four decision criteria: maturity of security controls, ease of use, cost, and scalability / agility for new deployments and continuous innovation. This last factor was critical, and we were impressed by Google Cloud’s innovation roadmap, both via direct conversations and at Google’s Next conference, where we met a lot of people passionate about technology, innovation and building something new.
Going back to our journey, given the above-mentioned regional limitations, we started to develop a hybrid cloud approach. This helped us continue to operate on-premises for a number of services in production, particularly those that have personally identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive data attached, and to leverage the cloud for development, testing and production workloads that don’t contain customer data.
In the short term, we didn’t anticipate that our many jurisdictions would allow data to be transported to other countries. But cloud tools will allow us to tokenize or anonymize customer data while maintaining customer data on-premises. This applies to many digital journeys such as customer onboarding, credit facility online applications, or marketplace navigation. In the coming years, we predict our API integration with partners will accelerate and enrich the overall digital value proposition of our business segments, namely consumer banking, small and medium-size businesses and large corporate and institutional clients.
Building connections and cornerstones in the cloud
The first move in our digital transformation was to implement Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, to connect to the world’s digital banking ecosystem. Apigee provides the security, sharing, mediation policies, and developer portal capabilities for us to successfully meet Open Banking standards while focusing on innovation.
On the back of the Apigee implementation, we created an accelerator program to incubate Fintech ideas that can, in turn, integrate into our digital platforms and be offered to our customers. We also developed various banking APIs, all designed and documented in accordance with PSD2 and Open Banking regulations, and made them available to our partners. These APIs exposed on our API development portal offer the needed code structure for fintech companies to design creative solutions around them.
Next, we adopted Anthos, Google Cloud’s managed application platform. Anthos has become a cornerstone of our operations because it works across hybrid cloud, offering integration of microservice containers and fueling collaborative opportunities with external parties. Our current Anthos infrastructure includes several hundreds of microservices now running on containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and on-premises. We now use the cloud for collaboration, development and testing, but not for production, which is done on-premises.
Along the way, Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) helped us through the entire cloud setup process, and with the adoption of Anthos. We originally built on the cloud tools through an iterative process, learning from our successes and errors along the way. Now that we have a better sense of how Anthos operates, we’re building a fresh infrastructure atop a sound, stable, and resilient foundation that will let us scale easily as we work to transform Arab Bank into a digital-first enterprise, that is our ambition.
Currently products running on Anthos include customer acquisition and onboarding via mobile apps, and our Arabi-Pay app, which allows customers to instantly pay each other via WhatsApp or other messaging platforms. Leveraging Anthos, our instant loan service for Arab Bank salaried employees can grant and disburse loans up to $7,000 in less than seven minutes.
In addition, we’ve built a number of digital journeys for our Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) customers, such as our SME client digital onboarding process and paperless SME lending platform.
While some may think that digital adoption in this part of the world can be slow, as customer contact remains anchored in our customs, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital banking services and electronic payments, inspiring more confidence to buy and pay online. Thanks to our rich and user-friendly banking app that relies on Apigee and Anthos for critical customer journeys, over 90% of new-to-bank customers are using our mobile apps. Within the next 18 months, we predict that number will be closer to 100%.
Of course, with higher customer adoption comes the challenge of potential service interruptions. A single moment of downtime can be highly visible to many digital customers. But Google Cloud’s Anthos and Apigee give us the flexibility to resume processes at a fast rate, so any interruptions are almost invisible to our customers. In fact, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, though our branches could be open only for limited hours each day, our consumer clients in particular were able to take advantage of our digital services in a very self-sufficient manner. Being well positioned with Google Cloud, we could also keep our internal teams and external partners connected and productive. Without Google Cloud, continuing the digital transformation of the bank at the pace we wanted would have been a big challenge.
Collaborating across borders and time zones
With Google Cloud, our ability to collaborate and partner has transformed significantly. We operate 24/7 now because our developers are scattered across multiple geographies and different time zones. Because testing and deployment can run around the clock, including on weekends, we currently deploy a new digital journey in a few weeks, faster than ever before. This has given our organization a spirited mindset that prioritizes innovation, and raised the bar in terms of our operating model.
Another consideration about Google Cloud tools is the elimination of inefficient processes typically seen in a software development lifecycle. We now build in a completely agile manner, from design squads until deployment in production. Compared to where we were two years ago, when we had an annual maximum of two systems releases in production, we now have close to monthly releases of our digital packages. In addition, we also supplement those monthly releases with additional ad-hoc releases and fixes in between. As a result, we have removed internal silos and improved tremendously the collaboration between the product and sales teams, operations, IT Dev Factory and Infrastructure, as well as our supporting functions.
Through the agile process facilitated by APIs, we introduced Design Thinking workshops involving external customers and prospects early on to understand their true pain points better and emotions during the existing journeys and how to make new digital journeys frictionless. As a result, the relevance of our products for various customer personas has improved tremendously.
Transcending banking
With Google Cloud, we can offer our customers so much more than just banking. We’ve become more digitally relevant to their lives. For example, we recently launched a mortgage app that helps customers all the way from home selection through mortgage negotiations and closing, and even to getting the home decorated. It’s an end-to-end journey in which API integration with key regional players was a cornerstone to our success.
For other digital products, we have an extensive roadmap of lifestyle-based solutions relevant to each segment and age group. We’ve only scratched the surface of the services we can provide, and we see the cloud as the future for everything we want to do.
Read more about Google Cloud’s Open Banking solution to learn how you can simplify and accelerate the process of delivering open banking as required by PSD2. You can also view our video on Open Banking, powered by Apigee API Management.
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Deep-dive into modern OS architecture built for the cloud
Cloud-based technology–and we all know this–has changed how we work. It has meant that we can work securely from any device, any location, anytime. You can be on a tablet, a phone, a laptop, a desktop, and you get to your work. You can collaborate with others in a really seamless way.
This is something, for those of you that will remember, you know, there was version 12 of the document and you’d send it out to eight people and they’d all give you different revisions and you’d have to somehow merge them together. But now, because it’s in the cloud, and there’s a central place, you can all be collaborating at the same time.
This has really fundamentally changed how fast we work and what happens in challenging times like we’ve been facing for the last several months were working from home didn’t all of a sudden mean you couldn’t do anything. An enormous number of people could continue working if the applications were built for the cloud from the very beginning.
Cloud-native endpoints such as Chrome OS provide the speed, ease of management, and security required as more workloads move to the cloud. This video includes a deep dive into Chrome OS’s multi-layered approach to computing and explores key features that provide differentiated benefits from legacy systems.
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