BRF is a leading food company with headquarters in Brazil and operations in 117 countries. With a portfolio of more than 800 products, their primary activities are the production of animal protein and the export of birds.

Country: Argentina

Industry: Food product production and exportation

Size: Over 90.000 employees

Context

The company required a tool that would enable it to digitalize all of its commercial agreements in order to accelerate the processes and perform both an analysis and follow-up on each one of them. In this context, there were several challenges: 

  • Reducing the time between commercial negotiating with allies and agreement approval in various corporate levels.
  • Speeding up the authorization process and digitizing it. 
  • Having a pormenorized administrative record will help them analyze investments more thoroughly. 
  • Keeping track of the clients’ sales history. 
  • Optimizing trade marketing investments across various clients and assessing their effectiveness.

Strategy

Undoubtedly, Flow was the best option in this situation because it enables the creation of an agile, transparent, and effective authorization circuit. Additionally, produces reports for case tracking and streamlining administrative processes.

In this regard, functions were developed taking into account the unique characteristics of BRF’s commercial management, and integration with the System of Client Management was among them (SAP). In the meantime, the design and development process went through different phases:

 

  • First, a survey was made on how they recorded everything in spreadsheets, variables, data, challenges and how the authorization circuit was configured were analyzed.

 

  • In addition, as part of the product thinking process, the people involved in the circuit were interviewed to understand the role they assumed in each step, and taking this information as a reference, the product design phase began.

 

  • Then intelligent formulas were created to enable the organization and optimization of the authorization chain, and work on SAP integration was done to create data analysis tools. Last but not least, a phased roll out of the product was completed, starting with the modern channel and eventually expanding to the entire company.

Results

  • Significant reduction in authorization and management timeframes.
  • Digitalization of all commercial and promotional agreements.
  • The execution time of a process that used to take weeks was cut down to just a few minutes.
  • More than 12 thousand actions were processed annually.
  • A clear analysis of how each promotional action affected sales was obtained.
  • The degree of client investment in promotional actions could be determined.
  • Reduction in operational costs

 

“Thanks to Flow, we were able to accelerate this process, which used to take between 4 and 5 weeks to manage but now resolves in minutes.”

Nancy Cragno- Financial responsibility in Marfrig Gropup