Muhammad Simjee and Sofiah Docrat, the husband and wife team behind digital consulting and implementation company, A2D24, have received the Innovator of the Year® award at the 2018 Entrepreneur of the Year® competition sponsored by Sanlam and BUSINESS/PARTNERS awards ceremony, which was held this morning in Johannesburg.
Founded in 2015, A2D24 provides businesses with cost-effective, innovative technology solutions that can be rapidly developed and rolled out across their operations. Some of their most notable achievements to date include an innovative app for Emergency Medical Services in Gauteng targeting to reduce the time it takes to dispatch ambulances to patients, a predictive model for a mobile phone network service provider in Cameroon, and a mobile application to assist in malaria prevention in Mozambique.
Over the last three years, A2D24 has grown from a one-man operation to a company that employs 18 people. The driving philosophy behind the business has been to use digital technology to enhance or replace inefficient manual processes.
Mohammad, who has a background in engineering, began building the tech start-up after developing a dashboard to monitor hospital bed availability, which the company would go on to successfully implement at nine hospitals in Gauteng to assist hospital staff in optimising bed availability. Sofia, on the other hand, was able to provide the majority of the funding for the business, and has taken on the role of chief financial officer (CFO) and human resources manager.
While the company was started solely on public sector contracts, Mohammad and Sofiah have actively been working towards attaining an equal balance of public and private sector clients. Currently around 70% of the work completed by A2D24 is for public sector clients, while the remaining 30% is for private sector contracts.
A2D24 also recently launched a globally unique point of sale system which allows retailers to track customers in stores in real time using mobile phone data. The system collects and converts data into actionable events for the relevant users. It also keeps track of poor performance, alerts on possible fraud, identifies opportunities for promotions, and provides in-depth information to retail managers.
In keeping with A2D24’s drive to develop solutions as rapidly as possible, this system, and its accompanying hardware, was designed and completed within the span of just three months.
According to the judging panel, A2D24 is a truly exciting business to follow. “Whether it is for a government hospital, or a private sector company, it is clear that the A2D24 team is able to enhance any operation that they are involved in. That is the spirit of an innovator,” the panel commented.
A2D24 has won several awards since its inception, including SITA’s Govtech SMME of the year in 2016 and the Gauteng Premier’s Service Excellence award in 2017. Having evolved A2D24 from a small start-up into an internationally competitive South African tech company by identifying challenges and offering simple, cost-effective solutions, is what makes the team of Mohammed and Sofia truly worthy of the title, Innovator of the Year®.
For more information on their business, please visit the A2D24 website: www.a2d24.com.