SLC Agrícola transforms its management and development system with the support of Azure, already targeting the future

Founded in 1977, SLC Agrícola produces cotton, corn, and soybean, in addition to working with livestock farming. Its headquartered in the city of Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and brings together 23 production units located in seven Brazilian states. In the 2021/22 crop season, the company's production totaled 672,400 planted hectares. 

With a history of growth in recent years, being a highlight on the stock exchange and winning several awards in the agribusiness sector, SLC Agrícola is recognized for its corporate governance, financial transparency, and investment in operational efficiency and innovation.  

Such an innovative stance led the company to choose a new management system that would support the demands of future growth. At the same time, it should be anchored on an infrastructure capable of providing resilience and security for its operations. 

Thus, in 2019, the company made the strategic decision to start a digital transformation process, with the support of Microsoft and partner company Cloud2Go, starting with the implementation of a new ERP, one of its main management systems for the SAP platform, opting for Microsoft Azure.

Implementing a cloud system supporting business growth 

"The project had a small margin of error and tight deadlines. The choice of Azure cloud has given us the confidence and agility to deliver resources on time and on a tailored basis, as well as supporting growth swings throughout the project. Azure has brought convenience and readiness to the entire SAP environment," explains Giovani Sartori, IT Infrastructure Coordinator at SLC Agrícola. 

SAP on Azure enabled customization of fully approved and certified computing services, meeting the compliance and governance criteria required by the project. João Aranda, manager of Infrastructure, Governance, and IT Services at SLC Agrícola, says that, throughout the project, between 2020 and 2021, the company grew from 16 production units to 22, accounting for a 40% increase in the size of the business and the number of people.  

"A big uncertainty was the user experience with application response time running in the cloud. We validated accesses in different connectivity scenarios, such as 4G, radio, MPLS, fiber, and worst-case, satellite links. After the tests, we realized that the application responded well with SAP in Microsoft Azure," says João. 

During this period, the SAP structure of the SLC Agrícola grew as the development stages and tests were evolving with flexibility and reliability. "Growth was a variable we didn't have at the beginning of the project, and the cloud made this resource provisioning much easier," he explains. 

The tool supported growth and change, enabling go live in November 2021.  

Development reduced from one day to minutes 

In parallel, SLC Agrícola launched a cloud development environment, seeking to create a centralized repository of versions of internally produced code and automate this deployment process. "Microsoft Azure, with scalability, flexibility, and elastic resource scaling, has shown that ease of operation, security, and management could be extended to building systems," contextualizes Bruno Cruz, Systems Development Coordinator at SLC Agrícola. 

The company chose Azure Kubernetes Service to support the process, Visual Studio, and Azure DevOps for the system development and maintenance process. 

Bruno assesses that this process promoted a culture change in the company. "We gained a lot of agility, with Azure DevOps we were able to create the automated conveyor that allows us to publish scalable applications in a few clicks. Adoption of code change flows (pipelines) with scheduled testing, approval criteria, and automatic package distributions has brought a lot of security and mobility," he explains.  

In this framework, it was possible to promote traceability and division of the development process into three environments, which were created, ratified, and approved securely and with agility. The new dynamics changed the process of publishing applications into production from a full day to just three minutes. 

"We have become very automated, which would currently make it impossible to remove the pipelines that were installed. New developers on the team who get into the wake of this process using Azure DevOps assimilate and learn in a few days. This conveyor guarantees us the quality of the code being passed and the speed when it is necessary to increase or decrease resources," Bruno continues.

Analytics, security, and data protection in progress 

In the first two years of implementation, SLC Agrícola focused on SAP on Azure implementation and the development environment. With these two parts underway, it started working on a new project: this time with analytics. 

"It's a process that's not just a tool, it's a team process. Again, we chose Microsoft because of everything that had worked here," says Bruno.   

The company opted for Azure Databricks to perform data processing and Azure Synapse Analytics for availability, in addition to Power BI visualization. The company is going through an adjustment phase for the creation of a BI Self Service framework. 

The next step was the implementation of Microsoft 365 E5 to bring security and enable the company to take another step in its digital transformation. "We seek to build a data-driven farm, where all the processing and workload of a rural farm, which produces, markets, sells and exports, runs in a cloud environment," explains João Aranda. 

This way, the company gets an entire cloud management system, outside of physical servers, with a more secure structure, with elasticity and flexibility. "Today we already have 100% of the farms migrated to SharePoint where the traditional file system, used by our employees, is running in the cloud providing an experience with good performance and data protection through the platform itself," adds João. 

In parallel, the deployment of Microsoft 365 E5 extends to strategic areas, such as Governance and Compliance. "Our idea is to use data protection resources to meet the requirements imposed by the Brazilian General Personal Data Protection Law," says Giovani Sartori. 

"At this point, we are interacting with our DPO team to leverage personal and sensitive data discovery capabilities, leveraging possibilities with the use of Microsoft Purview to generate a global data catalog and generate governance evidence in an easier and more tangible way," Giovani concludes.