PDI Software
With RingCentral, PDI Software can integrate acquired companies into their communications environment in days
0
disruptions in communication capabilities when PDI went 100% remote
1
day to set up high-priority employees from an acquired company with full access to RingCentral
16
acquired companies integrated into PDI’s RingCentral platform—all in two weeks or less
When we acquire a company, my IT team has only 90 days to get them set up in our communications environment—no matter where they are in the world. With RingCentral, we beat that goal… by a lot… every time.
Gary Dewrell
IT Manager
Fueling the success of petroleum sellers around the world
We rarely give it much thought, but for us to be able to stop at a gas station, stock up on essentials, and fill our car’s fuel tank—all at reasonable prices—requires tremendous coordination and logistical effort on the part of those businesses. For decades, one of the leading companies providing these services to convenience retailers and petroleum wholesalers has been PDI Software.
The company’s wide range of innovative software solutions—for fuel pricing, logistics, cloud-based marketing, inventory management, and other operations—has become so popular with retailers and wholesalers that PDI’s enterprise management software now powers more than 200,000 customer sites worldwide.
Today, PDI serves more than 1,500 retail and wholesale customers across more than 50 countries, and its software helps enable more than 50 billion gallons of fuel purchases each year.
In recent years, the company has been expanding its industry leadership position by rapidly acquiring businesses—well over a dozen companies in less than five years. With that rate of growth, and the need to integrate hundreds of new global employees into PDI’s corporate IT environment, the company needed a more flexible and agile cloud-communications solution.
An on-prem phone system running on fumes
PDI Software has been growing steadily for decades. But as the company began its exponential-growth phase a few years ago—purchasing several companies each year—the business’s on-prem phone infrastructure couldn’t keep pace.
“Our phone system held up fairly well for years, during normal rates of the company’s growth,” says IT Manager Gary Dewrell. “But then we kicked our expansion into overdrive, acquiring company after company all over the world. At that point, there was no way an on-premises, hardware-dependent phone system could support us anymore.”
Kristofer-Paul (“KP”) Tusman, PDI’s Senior Technology Technician, illustrates the challenge by recounting the problems his team faced during an early PDI acquisition. “We tried to get the new company set up in our on-premises phone environment. But we had delays with porting numbers, coordinating with their local carrier, and trying to get everyone set up with new phone hardware.”
KP adds: “It was pretty clear that model wasn’t going to work—definitely not for larger companies, which we were also in the process of acquiring. So, we started looking for cloud communications solutions that could support us globally.”
We had different platforms for telephony, instant messaging, and meetings, plus several regional telco relationships. RingCentral allowed us to consolidate it all into one solution.
KP Tusman
Senior Technology Technician
INDUSTRY
High Tech
HQ
Alpharetta, GA
YEAR FOUNDED
1983
EMPLOYEES
1,800
RingCentral helps PDI streamline new-company onboarding
When they rolled out RingCentral’s unified suite of cloud communications solutions—for business phone, online meetings, and team messaging—Gary and KP finally had a communications platform they could use to easily integrate newly acquired companies into the PDI corporate environment.
“Because RingCentral is cloud-based, now when we bring on a new company, we can just purchase numbers for them and roll out extensions and accounts to their employees right away,” says KP. “We don’t need to wait for telco carriers, hardware companies, third-party installers, or anyone else to get an acquired business fully up and running in our communications environment.”
Discovering more operational benefits with RingCentral
Although the initial driver behind PDI’s decision to move to a cloud communications solution was the ability to support newly acquired businesses, the company is also finding many other benefits to having RingCentral. Citing one example, KP points out that staff collaboration has gotten much more effective now that everyone has video conferencing capability built into their RingCentral desktop and mobile apps.
“We’re using RingCentral Meetings all the time… for internal meetings, customer training, even support calls where our agents use screen sharing to troubleshoot a customer’s issue,” KP says.
Gary notes that nearly all of the company’s 1,800 employees are frequent RingCentral Video users. “We have so many dedicated RingCentral Teams set up for specific purposes,” he says.
If someone opens an IT ticket in our Salesforce ticketing system, it will automatically send that case to a RingCentral Video channel for IT, so we all get notified. That way, we don’t have to keep checking Salesforce to see if there are issues waiting for us.
Gary Dewrell
IT Manager
And as KP explains, part of PDI’s expansion strategy is to become a 24/7 customer support operation for all of their customers globally—which means having support agents located all over the world. Now that the team is starting to roll out RingCentral Contact Center, they can see that they’ll be able to execute on that initiative much more quickly and successfully.
We’ve begun transitioning our support teams to RingCentral Contact Center, to give them even more functionality and flexibility in terms of directing calls to the right people and the right places. This is one of the biggest changes we’ve made in years in how we do business globally, and RingCentral is a big part of making it possible.
KP Tusman
Senior Technology Technician