How Petrobahia trained 30 analysts by automating its road operations

With more than three decades in operation and a monthly volume of more than three thousand road shipments, Petrobahia reached a natural inflection point: the moment when the scale of the operation demanded a new level of structure, visibility, and governance.

The road operation relied on 20 to 30 people who classified and logged documents at every arrival at the bases. The model got the job done, but it left little room for strategic analysis. The focus stayed on execution, not data analysis. Communication with carriers depended on individual outreach, and operational history sat scattered across systems. Record retrieval for audits took considerable time and effort.

Leadership recognized what growth and regulatory demands required: a centralized operation, automated repetitive routines, and a structured database that covered every event in the yard. Petrobahia wasn’t just after efficiency. It wanted operational maturity that matched the scale of a company that moves billions a year.

Pipefy’s rollout in Petrobahia’s road operation changed the model, not just the tool. The Kanban view delivered exactly what the team needed: full visual clarity on every stage of the logistics process. From the back office to the executive team, everyone could now see in real time where each shipment stood, which documents needed action, and which steps were on schedule.

Automation took over the operational communications that once demanded constant attention from assistants. Schedules sent to spot carriers, requests for expense reports, and alignment with managers, routines that used to run on emails sent one by one, now fire automatically through process triggers. Carriers get the right information at the right moment, with no human step in between.

Petrobahia also built a robust historical record of its operation. Every card documents the full cycle of each document process, including transfers between branches and loading orders. What once took considerable effort to track became a simple lookup: any record from up to two years back surfaces in a few clicks, which secures legal protection and speeds up responses to regulators.