Headquartered in Mato Grosso and with over 30 years of experience in the agribusiness market, Agro Amazônia currently serves, with its 450 employees, mainly the agricultural and livestock sectors in Brazil. The company's business revolves around the distribution of agricultural inputs and is currently present in Goiás, Tocantins, Rondônia, Pará, and plans to expand its activities to Mato Grosso do Sul. In 2015, the Japanese multinational Sumitomo Corporation acquired 65% of the company's shares, a partnership that has provided opportunities for the company to increase its participation in its customers' business chain. The company expects to close 2017 with revenues exceeding R$1 billion.
As with most companies, each sector needs data and information that enables them to take stock and make strategic decisions aimed at improving the company's performance in the market. In 2011, this demand for accurate and agile information led Agro Amazônia to feel the need for a BI solution, and at that moment QlikView was the chosen solution. The project was fully developed and implemented by Desq, a channel of the technology company Toccato, the largest Qlik distributor in Brazil.
The choice of QlikView came from a whatsapp saudi arabia of factors. First, it was necessary to provide a tool that was easy to operate and interact with users. Then, implementation had to be immediate and effective. Furthermore, the system had to be autonomous so that the company did not depend directly on the supplier for day-to-day changes.
“Qlik was the solution that met all three of our requirements. After we decided to hire it, everything was up and running within 30 days. The IT department was going through a very critical time, as several business areas were requesting raw data, usually urgent for management analyses, which would later be processed by the requesting area. As a result, the information obtained was not reconciled between the areas and therefore doubts arose regarding the veracity of the numbers presented, which created another demand for the technology area, which was the analysis of inconsistent results,” says Helen Cavalcante, IT Manager at Agro Amazônia.
In addition to the lack of information and the overload of the IT department, before the operation was based on the use of QlikView, all raw data was organized in non-specialized software, from which the extracted information could not be trusted, since each employee constructed it in a different way. And this was only part of the problem faced by the Agribusiness company; the delay in obtaining this data was another important factor for the IT department to leave its own projects in the background.
Today, QlikView is used by all managers at Agro Amazônia, including sales and administrative leaders. All dashboards are accessed daily to monitor: sales targets, profitability, budgets, demands, inventory and the entire financial cycle. Carrying out this type of supervision is essential, especially for a company that deals with seasonality and different harvests of products.
According to Rogério Faria, managing partner of technology company Desq, Qlik has now become an indispensable tool for Agro Amazônia’s operations. “The feedback we have received is extremely positive, since all analysis of the company’s goals and strategic decisions are based on information from QlikView,” he points out.
The experience with the analysis solution has been so positive that Agro Amazônia recently acquired NPrinting, a platform for creating reports generated using Qlik. The decision to acquire the new tool came from an analysis of the different profiles of managers who use Qlik, and then the realization that some of the public did not explore the solution as they should. Therefore, management reports will be an important tool to ensure that each leader is aware of and aware of the results, regardless of their direct interaction with the Qlik platform dashboards.
“We believe that by combining Agro Amazônia’s knowledge of its business with Toccato and Desq’s experience in business intelligence technology, we can offer the best solution for analyzing information as well as making important decisions in real time,” says Fabio Mello, Toccato’s Commercial Channel Director.
Having a Business Intelligence solution in any company can be an initiative of the business area or the IT area, and in the latter case, technology managers should feel encouraged to introduce this support tool for day-to-day business, as was the case at Agro Amazônia. “We, the IT area, were the ones who came up with Qlik, and so we had to make some adjustments to adapt it to the business sector. The fact is that today, maintaining operations in this way makes us more competitive, since we have reliable information quickly. In agribusiness, if we don’t have this agility, especially at the beginning of the harvest season, and we take too long to draw up a strategy, we will fall behind, since this market is really very dynamic”, concludes Helen.