Algar Agro, focused on the production and commercialization of soybeans, underwent a digital transformation project managed by Algar's Corporate Solutions Center (CSC). Started in July 2015, the initiative was completed at the end of 2016.

The solutions involved in the project include Oracle Hyperion, Oracle Business Suite, Maxicon and AgriOne. All the solutions adopted run on the company's private cloud.

Entitled Checkmate, the aim of the project was to give the company more visibility over the way it conducts business, taking into account its main value chains. The initiative worked with four pillars of digital transformation: mobility, cloud, big data analytics and social.

The main sectors worked on were origination, logistics, international execution, trading/risks, budgeting and back office.

"Our expectation is to give the organization a complete overview of the market, showing the degree of exposure, verifying that everything that was being purchased was being moved in stocks, monitoring the entire budget and all of this underpinned by a layer of analytical data," says Diogo Henrique Martins, IT director at Algar Agro.

In addition to a team of around 30 people, including IT professionals from CSC and Algar Agro, Xeque-mate had the support of global consultancies, including Accenture, Hitachi Consulting, Cis and Oracle.

In the second phase, the company implemented new technologies. One of the focuses was the creation of an international execution model for the company, to manage all stages of the export chain.

The company adopted Accenture RiskControl, which offers analytics for treasury and trading, risk management and controllership.

Then Oracle Hyperium was implemented, with the support of the CIS consultancy, for budget management.

"The tool models all of the company's business planning, which allows simulations and predictive analyses to be carried out in relation to variables in the field," says Martins.

For the adoption of Oracle E-Business Suite, Algar relied on Hitachi consulting. A EBSDBA was responsible for the Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure and the system's integration with Maxicom, using the Oracle SOA Suite.

Algar Agro also implemented Oracle's BI system to have all the company's operational indicators to evaluate the business and visualize trends.

With 550 employees, Algar Agro is part of the Algar Group, founded in 1930. Around 23,000 professionals work in the group, serving almost 2 million customers with solutions in ICT, Agribusiness, Services and Tourism.

Algar Agro has a physical infrastructure with 17 warehouses and 1 transshipment located close to the grain origination areas and two soybean processing units.

In addition to producing, processing and selling soybeans on the domestic and foreign markets, its anchor products are ABC soybean oil and RaçaFort soybean meal. The retail food product mix also includes olive oil, extracts and tomato sauce, all under the ABC brand.