About Alvaz

Alvaz is a Brazilian business developing technology for agriculture — also known as an agritech. The main service they provide is Crop Management with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), in which licensed pilots fly drones over crops to assess a harvest’s health.

Founded in 2018, the company has grown quickly, increasing its numbers of employees and customers with each new crop cycle. They currently do business in 7 Brazilian states along with other countries in the Americas, such as Argentina and Canada.

Alvaz’s growing pains

With only 4 years of business, Alvaz’s greatest challenge so far has been the fast growth their market has demanded of them. With each new crop cycle, more customers request the company’s services, increasing the demand for employees and process organization. 

In 2019, for example, the company began the year with 5 employees and ended it with 20. Processes done over messages and in person conversation weren’t going to work anymore. 

Alvaz’s expansion into more countries and Brazilian states also meant their employees needed a quick and reliable way to direct their requests to the central office. Most of those requests were equipment-related, such as demands for uniforms and safety equipment, but they also included reports of issues with drone flights, generally requiring spare parts be sent for maintenance. 

Growing at such a pace, by 2020, with around 30 employees, Alvaz was frequently missing deadlines and had no visibility over the status of their many requests. To solve this, they searched the market for a solution to help manage their requests and improve the employee experience. 

With the team’s fast growth, it was quite common for us to miss deadlines or deliver incomplete orders. This was negatively impacting our employees’ experience and productivity in the field.

Rafael Jefté

Operations Supervisor at Alvaz

Centralizing all requests in Pipefy

Alvaz came to Pipefy at the beginning of 2020 with the goal of centralizing all their employee requests in a single place. Their team was able to standardize the entire request process right from the start, ensuring their office team receives all the required information to fulfill their field workers’ requests quickly.

All those involved in their processes have benefited from using Pipefy:

• Employees in the field can now request products and services from the office team more easily and reliably.
• Office employees now always have all the data they need to comply with the field agent’s requests promptly.
• Managers now have control and visibility over all demands

For requesters, the process starts by filling out a Pipefy form. After doing so, the requester receives automated emails confirming their request has been received, as well as informing them about approval and equipment delivery. 

For the office team, Pipefy ensures all necessary data is gathered efficiently and automates several steps of the process. One example of automation is email notification of status updates for each request, which could be a very repetitive and time-consuming task if it was done manually.

As for managers, Pipefy allows them to collect data from the process, such as the most common requests and the value of each request. This allows their team to be more assertive and make data-based decisions. 

Main results: agility and scalability

Two years after starting to use Pipefy, Alvaz has already seen many positive results — both in terms of quantity and quality.

First and foremost, they’ve cut the time to process each request by 50%. Before Pipefy, the team took 2 to 3 days to receive requests, process them, and send the required materials to their employees in the field. With Pipefy, this whole workflow takes less than 24 hours. The field team can be sure that they’ll receive exactly what they asked for, and the office team has also gained agility in screening and prioritizing urgent requests.

Having more control of this process allowed them to improve their decision-making as managers can now view and analyze data, such as the number of requests put in by each employee, what are the more common requests, and the main problems occurring in the field.

Besides centralizing and gaining more control over their operations, Alvaz also gained efficiency with process automations. The team was relieved of several manual tasks such as email notifications. Automating these tasks allowed the office team to dedicate more time to strategic and higher added-value tasks.

With Pipefy, we can email our field employees automatically. They receive confirmation as soon as their request is sent. When we approve or deny the request, they’re notified immediately. It may seem simple, but considering each request demands several email messages, and multiplying that by over 100 requests, our team would be losing 3 to 4 hours a day.

Rafael Jefté

Operations Supervisor at Alvaz

Next steps with Pipefy

Alvaz is still growing consistently with each crop cycle. They had 40 employees at the beginning of 2022, and that number is forecasted to keep growing. They started using Pipefy for Employee Requests Management, but currently manage all their internal processes with Pipefy.

One of these processes is Recruitment, due to the team’s high demand for professionals. Each department constructed its own workflow and uses Pipefy to pick their ideal candidates. 

With more employees and customers, Alvaz will continue to improve its business processes, and Pipefy will continue to be a trusted partner.