CASE STUDY
How GPA House tripled their marketing deliveries with Pipefy
About GPA
GPA is a company from Grupo Casino present in Brazilian regions. With more than 50,000 employees in the country, they are one of South America's largest retailers and control brands such as Mercado Extra, Compre Bem, and Pão de Açúcar.
Management issues with emails and messages
GPA’s marketing department has several divisions. One of them is the GPA House, which works as an internal agency responsible for creating marketing and digital pieces for some of their brands (Pão de Açúcar and Extra), among other contributions.
The GPA House team had a hard time planning these marketing assets. Requests for new assets were handled via email or WhatsApp, making it difficult to find information. The income requests were frequently incomplete, requiring some back-and-forth communication, and deadlines were challenging to keep up with, especially in times of increased demand.
Some of GPA House’s deliverables, such as seasonal campaigns, are particularly time-sensitive. In these cases, delays in the creation flow can ruin these campaigns. That used to happen frequently, impacting GPA’s results.
Given these problems, the team decided to adopt a free version of a workflow management tool to organize this process. However, according to GPA’s House Creative Manager, Roberto Parravano, they soon realized that the tool's scarcity of resources caused the same problems common in other channels.
During Black Friday in November, we went through a lot of trouble because requests would come via email, by messages, by the workflow tool, and we could not organize them. Given that rush, a lot of tasks were left behind.”
Roberto Parravano
Creative Manager at GPA House
As time passed, the team learned that their process could benefit from a more powerful tool. Therefore, they started searching for new solutions between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. One of them was Pipefy, which was already being adopted by the GPA Innovation team. That coincidence streamlined the implementation on GPA House’s side.
Standardized processes mean fast results
At the end of October 2020, GPA House started using Pipefy by building workflows and automations. That first trial evolved into a more extensive test with an entire squad in January and February 2021.
Due to the initial success, the team started to use the platform more widely in April 2021. At that point, more than 50 team members managed requests with Pipefy. This adoption brought such positive results that, in only six months, the company doubled the number of Pipefy licenses.
One of the reasons behind this success was the customization capabilities of Pipefy’s forms. This single feature allowed GPA House to centralize and improve the briefings they received. Combined with automations, these standardized forms streamlined their work.
If you access our portal and complete a certain request, it is routed to the right person. If you need content, it goes to our editor. You will be directed straight to the design team if you don't need it. It is clear who owns each incoming request. So, in a matter of weeks, we scaled our operation.”
Roberto Parravano
Creative Manager at GPA House
According to Parravano, Pipefy’s usage increased as the market started recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines became more broadly available. The platform was a game-changer, Pavano states. “We had a lot of work to do, and I can't even imagine how we would have managed it here via email or with the workflow tool we used before.”
In his view, Pipefy’s Support was critical for the implementation. Pipefy’s team initially helped GPA House extract data from their previous process and refine the automations they had already implemented. “The support Pipefy provides to the users is very good,” he considers.
The results illustrate the benefits Pipefy has provided. In August 2019, Parravano's team supported four different areas of the company using a workflow tool. That month, the team received 163 briefings and delivered 675 pieces. In August 2022, using Pipefy, GPA House received 520 briefings (219% increase) and produced 2017 pieces (nearly 200% increase).
Black Friday, one of the biggest bottlenecks for the team due to increased requests, became more manageable. From 2019’s Black Friday (when the team used the previous workflow solution) to that of 2022, there was a 90% increase in the briefings managed by the team and a peak of approximately 80% in the number of assets delivered.
Expansion and inclusion
GPA House now manages a series of pipes (workflows at Pipefy), including internal clients from other marketing areas: Media, Marketplace, Special Projects, Trade Marketing, and others. Since they are GPA House’s internal clients, their inclusion in the standardized processes brought mutual benefits.
The design team leveraged huge benefits. The feedback we receive from employees is great. Each request comes with the precise information we need to receive, and it didn’t happen before since we didn’t have mandatory fields to be filled. Applicants spend less time filling in the form because everything is clear, and the designers spend less time delivering the assets”.
Roberto Parravano
Creative Manager at GPA House
Parravano believes Pipefy also streamlined the integration of new employees at GPA House. “I don't focus so much on the workflow explanations because Pipefy is very intuitive. In a week, in the worst scenario, the new employee is already requesting and interacting with the tool,” he says.
At this point, Parravano estimates GPA House has mapped around 60% of its creation flow, from the briefing to the execution. Their goal in 2023 is to integrate the remaining 40%, including the commercial team, with which Parravano's team still interacts using spreadsheets and OneDrive.
Once that happens, the entire request flow, from commercial negotiation to asset creation, will be centralized in Pipefy, unlocking the benefits of organization, agility, and efficiency that GPA House has already been leveraging . The team is mapping and testing these flows' integration into their processes.
Before Pipefy
- Requests were managed by email, Whatsapp, and another workflow tool
- Incoming briefings lacked information, leading to rework and delays in deliveries
- Lack of visibility regarding demand owners
- Difficulties in finding information about specific requests
After Pipefy
- Requests are centralized on Pipefy, with a standardized process
- Automatic task assignment, streamlined request tracking
- Visibility of all requests and filters so any data can be found in in a few clicks
- 219% increase in the number of briefings received
- 200% increase in the number of pieces delivered