Berneck saves 10,080 hours per quarter with Pipefy

Fast growth comes with a quiet cost. When Berneck’s order volume climbed from roughly 150 per month and doubled in just a few months, the spreadsheets holding the operation together simply stopped working. The International Trade team lost reliable visibility into deadlines, critical documents started slipping through the cracks of email inboxes, and email itself became the default management tool for lack of any better option.

The impact hit the bottom line fast. Shipments to China, Berneck’s largest destination, began arriving with documentation past the deadline, triggering fines that quickly became a recurring expense. Without traceability across the booking process, supervisors had to dig through multiple systems just to answer basic questions about an order’s status.

Underneath all of this was a structural problem. Lead time, the metric essential for managing performance and communicating timelines to customers, simply could not be measured with confidence. Scale was turning into inefficiency.

Berneck chose Pipefy to orchestrate its export processes. The platform gave the International Trade team the autonomy to design and adjust their own workflows without waiting on the IT backlog, which was critical in an operation where rules shift by destination, by customer, and by shipment type.

The first four months delivered concrete visibility gains. Information that had been scattered across spreadsheets and email finally had a single home, with real-time status. From that foundation, Karine Correa, the area’s supervisor, took the transformation further by pairing the platform with Lean Six Sigma methodology, building a continuous cycle of review and waste elimination.

Email templates and automations took over repetitive communications. Dashboards replaced spreadsheets for tracking orders, deadlines, and documents. The operation gained predictability around SLAs and the ability to spot bottlenecks before they turned into fines.

After one year running on Pipefy, Berneck has moved off spreadsheets. The fines for missed deadlines, once a recurring line item, gave way to systematic cost control, with direct savings in the thousands of dollars per year on charges the team had previously written off as unavoidable.

The gains show up across the entire operation: 46% of email communications were automated, removing roughly 3,000 manual messages per quarter, and unnecessary logistics department expenses dropped 90%.

Day to day, the effect is harder to quantify but just as clear. The team gained room to make decisions with data, space previously spent hunting down and reformatting information. International Trade now communicates with the rest of the company through dashboards rather than email threads. And the operation grows without the workload growing at the same pace.

Berneck is one of Brazil’s largest exporters of wood-based panels, shipping more than 3,500 TEUs per month to nearly 60 countries and serving industries that include construction, automotive, electronics, packaging, and furniture. For over seven decades, the company has combined continuous investment in technology, rigorous quality control, and the development of more versatile and sustainable applications for wood.