Pipefy

Alvaz, a Brazilian agritech company, faced significant challenges due to its rapid growth. With each new crop cycle, the demand for their services increased, leading to a surge in the number of employees and the need for better process organization. In 2019, the company grew from 5 to 20 employees, making traditional methods of communication and process management insufficient. As Alvaz expanded into more countries and Brazilian states, the need for a reliable system to manage employee requests to the central office became evident. These requests were primarily equipment-related, including uniforms, safety equipment, and drone maintenance parts. By 2020, with around 30 employees, Alvaz was frequently missing deadlines and lacked visibility over the status of their many requests. The company needed a solution to manage their requests and improve the employee experience.

Ocean Network Express (ONE), the world’s seventh-largest container carrier, was formed following the merger of Japan’s three largest shipping lines in 2017. The merger led to a complex and disjointed process architecture, with a lack of communication between departments and systems posing a significant challenge. The accounts payable process, critical for timely vendor payments, was particularly inefficient, involving three different sub-departments within the finance team. The process was primarily decentralized, managed manually, and often involved a lengthy paper trail. The finance team used spreadsheets to keep the process on track, but it was difficult to manage and standardize. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these issues, as the shift to remote work made the process unmanageable and hindered seamless communication between the finance sub-departments and systems. The team needed a platform, system, or tool to fit all of their processes in this new reality.

GE Healthcare, a global leader in medical technology and digital solutions, faced several challenges in managing support requests from its channel partners. The company provides medical equipment and services to clinicians worldwide, and when a piece of equipment is down, the channel partner may reach out to GE Healthcare for help. Capturing and managing these support requests was a complex task, often leading to hours spent searching for information. Additionally, GE Healthcare needed to ensure that channel partners were delivering the same level of support to their customers as those supported directly by GE. However, with their existing customer support process, GE managers had little visibility into support requests. They were unaware of the number or status of requests and who was responsible for each. This lack of process control and visibility into channel partners led to the realization that a change was necessary.

Lacoste, a globally recognized fashion brand, faced significant challenges with its reimbursement process, particularly in its Brazilian e-commerce operations. The surge in online sales due to the Covid-19 pandemic led to an increase in customer return requests, which required a quick and error-proof reimbursement process to ensure optimal customer experience. For debit card purchases, the Finance team had to initiate a lengthy process of collecting and running the client’s information through internal approvals until it could be handed off to the Accounts Payable team. This process was organized through email, spreadsheets, and printed documents, with the approval flow being the most manual part. The Finance team had to gather physical signatures before processing the reimbursement payment. The increase in online sales and remote working began to impact the deadlines for customer reimbursements directly. The Finance team needed to find a digital and agile solution to gain efficiency in this process and replace their manual workflow.

Fluidra, a global leader in pool and wellness equipment, faced significant challenges in managing their new product development process. Despite having a project management tool, it lacked the flexibility and visibility required for efficient operations. One of the main issues was the inability of the tool to allow different teams to run parallel processes simultaneously. This limitation meant that one department could only commence a step after another had finished, leading to an extended new product development cycle. Additionally, the previous solution was inflexible and high-code, necessitating the involvement of the IT team whenever any changes were required by the Fluidra teams.

Sofisa Bank, a leading credit analysis company in Brazil, was facing challenges in managing customer requests due to unstandardized solutions. The bank's commercial department, which directly connects with customers, and the operations team, which fulfills all service requests, were struggling with communication. The exchange of requests between these departments was conducted entirely through email, without any standard or oversight. This lack of standardization often led to missed deadlines and complicated exchanges, negatively impacting the customer experience.

BeerOrCoffee, Latin America’s largest coworking platform, faced significant challenges as a 100% remote organization. The company, which has over 1,100 spaces in over 170 Brazilian cities and other global locations, struggled with managing its remote teams and standardizing internal processes. The lack of a centralized tool for managing processes led to difficulties in standardizing internal processes, as different teams used different platforms. Data storage was another challenge, as the use of various cloud services hampered interactions between coworkers and departments. Marcelo Bogobil, IT and Integrations Manager, was particularly affected by the lack of centralization and standardization of data, given his location in a different time zone from his coworkers.

Company Combo, a provider of accounting, taxes, and company formation services, faced a complex operation due to the diverse legislation and particularities of the 50 states in the US. Their main workflow involved opening new companies, which required adapting to different scenarios based on the state's legislation. The company also managed around 80 other processes, including opening legal accounts and internal company processes. Prior to implementing Pipefy, Company Combo used a project management tool that made processes hard to visualize and customize. The tech team often needed to create custom code to adapt the software to their unique needs. Managers lacked autonomy to create and improve their processes, and visual tracking of each process’ status was nonexistent. The method they used for tracking was too densely packed with data and offered no real insight. Communication with customers was manual and repetitive, via email or the customer support team, which made it difficult to scale the company’s services.

Adventures, a rapidly expanding Latin American brand ecosystem, faced the challenge of standardizing its processes without stifling creativity. As the company grew, it became increasingly difficult to manage customer accounts and maintain operational efficiency. The back office departments, including Purchasing, Finance, People, Management, Culture (Human Resources), IT, and Legal, were receiving requests through various channels, such as Slack, email, and verbal communication. This lack of structure led to several issues, including incomplete information in requests, inability to measure the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of each request, risk of losing or forgetting requests, and lack of clarity for requesters about the status of their requests. To address these issues, Adventures formed a committee to evaluate market platforms that could streamline and automate their processes.

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.

Capgemini Brazil's HR department was struggling with inefficient manual processes and a lack of standardization in handling employee requests. The HR team was receiving an average of 2,500 requests per month through various channels, without any categorization or prioritization. This led to a significant amount of time being spent on triaging and processing these requests, with five full-time employees dedicated to this task. The process also involved bottlenecks such as the need for physical paperwork and manager signatures, leading to employee dissatisfaction. Despite their efforts, the HR team was unable to meet their goal of triaging 95% of tickets within the correct Service Level Agreement (SLA), with a success average of only 38%.

CTA Smart, a national leader in the control and management of internal fuel supply, was facing significant challenges in scaling their sales and managing their operations efficiently. Despite having a lean structure of about 60 employees, they were handling a high volume of customers, supply points, and fuel loads. In 2019, the lack of standardization and the use of about eight disconnected systems were preventing the commercial team from being agile enough to scale their sales. This lack of connection between systems also impacted other departments’ work, such as finance, customer support, and production. These teams didn’t receive all the information they needed to manage their respective processes efficiently, often delaying deliveries for contracts and services. Furthermore, CTA Smart's top leadership was struggling to consult and control the company's operational metrics due to the lack of integration and clarity of information flows.

Pequeno Príncipe Hospital (HPP), Brazil's largest children's hospital, faced significant challenges in managing its donation and fundraising operations. The hospital, which provides care for children and adolescents who do not have free access to healthcare, relies heavily on community support and donations. However, the New Projects department, responsible for fundraising, was struggling with outdated processes and systems. For the first decade, they used an outdated CRM, and most internal processes were managed manually. Processes like sales (donations) funnel management, accounts receivable, and customer onboarding were managed separately through spreadsheets, email, and paper documents. As the hospital's operations and the number of donors grew, the decentralized and manual management of these processes became a major bottleneck, causing rework and communication challenges.

Tempo Assist, the largest specialized services company in Brazil, was facing challenges in achieving digital efficiency. One of their main objectives was to invest in technology to improve the experiences of their customers, vendors, and employees. A significant issue was their Accounts Payable to Vendors process, which was manual and handled over email, leading to delays and problems due to the high volume of around six thousand requests monthly. The company was also using an inflexible and unintuitive process management tool, which required the IT team's intervention for any changes or creation of new workflows. As a result, most internal processes were managed over email and spreadsheets, leading to inefficiencies and bottlenecks.