Loja Elétrica reclaims 2,500 hours a month with Pipefy

Founded in 1947, Loja Elétrica still ran on a culture built around paper and manual work. With more than 65,000 items in stock across 20 locations, the company depended on an aging in-house ERP that could not keep pace with the demands of so many different departments. The result was a fragmented operation with no standardization and no visibility into process data.

Procurement felt the strain most acutely. Fifteen buyers processed more than 1,000 requests a day, every one of them by email. With no efficiency metrics to work from, the team piled up rework and operated at the edge of its capacity.

The barrier to scaling was structural. Any change to the legacy system took months to implement, when it was possible at all, leaving the team overloaded and short on delivery capacity.

The turning point came with the decision to adopt a cloud-based, no-code platform that put control in the hands of managers. On Pipefy, the rollout started with simple processes such as travel requests and quickly scaled to the critical Quote and Purchase Order workflows. The Controllership team began modeling its own processes without waiting on IT.

Requests that once lived in email inboxes became automated, standardized workflows, supported by 21 structured forms for internal demands. Moving from paper to digital cards put an end to lost information and made it possible to adjust a workflow in minutes rather than months.

Today the solution spans nine departments, including Finance, HR, Legal, and Marketing. With processes centralized, managers track team performance in real time and make decisions grounded in hard data.

The productivity gain was immediate: 2,500 hours handed back to the team every month, hours once lost to manual tasks and rework. The user base grew from 10 to 100 with no loss of control as new departments adopted the standardized workflows.

The financial return tracked the operational one, at 448% ROI. Cutting reliance on paper and email unlocked the operation’s ability to scale and reshaped how the company viewed technology, with leaders fully invested in an environment that is standardized, fast, and completely traceable.

Loja Elétrica is Brazil’s largest distributor of electrical materials, with more than 70 years in the market. Headquartered in Belo Horizonte, it operates a network of 20 stores and carries over 65,000 items from national and international brands. The company employs 1,400 people and runs the largest distribution center of its kind in Latin America.