Digital Transformation in Agriculture: Coplacana's Journey from Manual to Automated Processes

Coplacana, the São Paulo State Sugarcane Farmers Cooperative, was founded in 1948 and was the first agricultural cooperative for sugarcane farmers in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. The cooperative offers over 12 thousand farming-focused items and comprehensive farming advisory services. It has a company size of 201-500 employees with teams in Credit and Register, Finance, IT, Auditing, Sales, and Human Resources. The cooperative was in an accelerated growth process and needed to improve its processes, which led to the partnership with Befire and the implementation of Pipefy.

Coplacana, the São Paulo State Sugarcane Farmers Cooperative, was facing significant challenges in managing its processes. The cooperative was experiencing rapid growth and needed to improve its operations. The administration teams were using a variety of unconnected tools such as email, Excel, ERPs, and Google Drive to manage their workloads and data. This led to general inefficiency in workflows, repetitive non-scalable manual activities, lack of process visibility and monitoring, and poor communication regarding status updates or request conclusions. The company was also dealing with missed deadlines, bottlenecked processes and subprocesses, and a lack of reports, which reduced visibility over process improvement opportunities. The management was reactive to events and incidents, which further exacerbated the situation.

In response to these challenges, Coplacana partnered with Befire, a Pipefy partner company, to start a digital transformation process. The goal was to automate routines and connect flows that were being carried out manually. After thorough market research, Pipefy was chosen as the solution to avoid data losses and errors in processes. The implementation began in January 2021, and the team was able to quickly standardize their processes and automate several repetitive tasks. Pipefy’s flexibility and ease of customization played a fundamental role in the success of the partnership. Processes and systems that previously required IT assistance for implementation could be quickly customized by each department’s leader.

• The implementation of Pipefy brought about significant operational improvements for Coplacana. The cooperative was able to standardize its processes across different teams in over 30 branches. The standardization, speed, and process monitoring reduced operational costs and the risk of errors. The system also made it easy to automate processes and create segmented communications. The cooperative gained the capacity to control and manage each process’ lead time and SLA. The management, directors, and administrative council now have total visibility of results with indicator reports. The IT demands backlog was reduced, and there was an increase in accuracy in internal auditing controls.

• End-to-end standardized processes on Pipefy, with different teams acting in over 30 branches

• Reduced operational costs and risk of errors due to standardization, speed, and process monitoring

• Ability to control and manage each process’ lead time and SLA