Case Study
How Adventures gained efficiency with process integration and automation
About Adventures
Adventures is building the largest Latin American brand ecosystem of creative, influence, e-commerce, and technology products and services across the consumer journey. The company builds and scales its own brands in partnership with celebrities.
The challenge to standardize processes without losing creativity
Creating, controlling and following processes is not an easy task, especially when you’re in a company with creativity as its main characteristic. Structuring and following processes might seem bureaucratic and prone to limit the creativity and independence of teams – but the reality can be different. With well-standardized workflows, teams have more time to innovate and focus on tasks that need to be performed by each person.
In 2021, Adventures started to expand with a rapid increase in customers and accounts to be managed. As operations scaled, the company decided to focus on increasing the efficiency of its entire operation.
The first step towards this goal was to focus on improvements in back office departments, such as Purchasing, Finance, People, Management, Culture (Human Resources), IT and Legal. By 2021, these teams received requests through many different channels, such as Slack, email, and even verbally. This lack of structure to receive requests caused different problems:
- Requests barely arrived with all the information needed by administrative teams, undermining efficiency.
- Managers were unable to measure the SLA of each request or extract any other process data.
- Requests and information were at risk of being forgotten/lost, negatively impacting the requester experience.
- Requesters didn’t have a clear path to check the status of each request and were often asked for updates, putting a strain on the team responsible for delivering the request.
The second step was creating a committee with employees from different teams, such as IT and Operations, and representatives from other areas that had an affinity with technology to evaluate market platforms that would solve all these problems.
A few months after testing and meeting with several vendors, Adventures chose Pipefy to be the central platform to host the company's processes. The process automation mindset and the integration with other routinary tools made it possible for decision-making to understand the orchestrating capacity that Pipefy has – not only for a specific department, but for several areas.
In addition to filling our needs, I knew the ideal platform needed to be flexible, intuitive, and look good. We put a lot of emphasis on the user experience, so the ease of use was key to success on our team.”
Clara Medeiros
Corporative Process Manager
Flexibility and process automation as solutions
In their first months using Pipefy, Adventures’s focus was to deploy the platform in some departments (HR, Finance, and IT).
The IT department used a helpdesk tool before Pipefy, but Pipefy's process automation and integration capabilities convinced the team to adopt it. As for the Process Management department, the quick support Pipefy offers made a huge difference in delivering results.
Despite using other tools for specific processes, the People and Management team still had several manual processes that lacked control and centralization. As the company expanded, besides hiring new employees, Adventures also needed to hire freelancers for small and specific projects.
As a result, the processes chosen to be implemented in Pipefy were admission, employee onboarding, freelance professionals recruitment, and HR requests. The implementation was supervised by the Process Management team.
Picture of the admission process, which was managed in a single spreadsheet before Pipefy.
The IT department also managed to centralize all IT requests in Pipefy, receiving all of them via standardized online forms. In addition to general requests, the IT team was also able to connect their processes to the processes from other departments.
An example of process connection across different areas is employee onboarding flows. When an employee is hired, the IT team automatically receives this information, containing all the employee's data — speeding up equipment purchasing and the activation, or deactivation, of different systems. This process was previously conducted via email and message threads, causing potential errors and inefficiency.
In the Finance department, almost all the team's processes were implemented in Pipefy, such as purchasing, accounts payable, and reimbursement requests.
What impressed me the most about Pipefy as an IT analyst is the automation capability. In the employee onboarding process, for example, when the People and Management team moves the card to a specific phase, I immediately receive all the information in my pipe (workflow) so I can provide the equipment needed before the employee’s start date.”
Bruno Nobre
IT Support Analyst
The results achieved
In July 2022, exactly 10 months after Pipefy’s adoption, the Adventures team was able to see clear results from this shift. There are currently 23 active processes managed at Pipefy and that number still increases. In addition to structuring the flows, the team was also able to save time by automating several manual steps. During these 10 months, the team saved an average of 1,700 hours per month, considering all the forms of automation that Pipefy offers.
Shortly after the beginning of Pipefy's widespread adoption, the Adventures team also created its own portal on the company’s intranet, centralizing all request forms in a single place.
Image of Adventures intranet, where links to all Pipefy forms are centralized.
Pipefy’s implementation, combined with the new intranet portal, brought much more organization to processes. Requesters, end users, and managers now have a clear idea of how each process works and where they are being managed.
This organization made it possible for each team to start controlling the SLA of their processes. Before Pipefy, many requests arrived in an email inbox, so it was not possible to track their status or calculate how long the orders would take at each step of the process.
In the Finance team, which faced the same problems, gathering the documentation and the history of requests into only one place is among the most important gains in this period. After the start of SLA control, the team could already predict how long each request would be delivered, reaching an average of 2 to 3 days of SLA.
As for the IT team, which already had a process structured in another tool, it was possible to track the agility increase after Pipefy’s implementation. Before, the team had an average SLA of 48 hours. With all the new automations and process connections, that number has dropped to 16 hours. In addition, Bruno Nobre also noticed relevant improvement in the quality of work.
Despite saving relatively little time individually, Pipefy’s automations make a big difference for me. At the end of the day, I can save almost 2 hours of work, considering emails I don't need to send and cards I don't need to open.”
Bruno Nobre
IT Support Analyst
Next steps
In only 10 months, Pipefy has already enabled the digital transformation at Adventures, but the seek for efficiency remains a priority for the team.
In the HR team, the main goal is to continue automating processes. Even with Pipefy, there are still manual tasks to be eliminated, such as the amount of emails to be sent and received daily.
At the same time, the IT team, which could lower the SLA to 16 hours, expects to reach an average SLA of 8 hours for general requests.
For the Finance team, the priority is to achieve an integration between Pipefy and Netsuite, the ERP system they already work with. This integration will unlock the team’s capacity to transfer information between the two systems, saving manual work and increasing the efficiency.
The best part of integrating Pipefy and Netsuite is that automation happens in both ways. The integration sends information from Pipefy to Netsuite, but also brings it back, allowing cards to be moved without any manual action, for example.”
Bárbara Marques
Finance Processes Specialist
