A booming Brazilian food producer boosts IT delivery

São Salvador Alimentos (SSA), a leading Brazilian food producer, was experiencing rapid growth: In just one year, sales had surged by 35%, and its workforce had expanded significantly. To support this growing business, the IT team was using a mix of email and open-source service management software—an approach incapable of handling all of the IT requests coming from employees. A new IT service management (ITSM) tool was needed for an IT team that itself grew from 15 to 70 employees in short order.

The IT team turned to Freshservice for a consistent ITSM solution to ensure compliance, boost productivity, and enhance the overall employee experience.

The implementation reduced Tier 2 escalations by 10% and improved SLA response times by 16%. With Freshservice's user-friendly, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-aligned platform, SSA standardized incident management and established a comprehensive self-service knowledge base to meet the growing needs of its 8,000-person workforce.

The company

São Salvador Alimentos (SSA) is one of Brazil’s largest food producers, with nearly 10,000 employees. In its poultry business, SSA oversees every step of the value chain, from egg production to distribution of finished products, reaching customers’ kitchens under popular brands like SuperFrango and Boua.

The challenge

Facing an increasing volume of IT demands from the company’s quickly expanding workforce, SSA needed to make IT workflows more efficient to serve its nearly 8,000 employees. Previously, SSA had used open-source software platform GLPI to handle IT service requests, with tickets submitted by email and linked to SSA’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system via a solution that had been developed in-house. As the company grew, this solution could not scale to meet demand.

With a lack of consistency in IT service management, SSA needed to implement a structured, standardized approach to IT service delivery that would allow it to better serve employees while maintaining cost control. It was critical to offer automation and self-service to free up an IT team that, while growing, was focused on a key corporate priority: digital transformation initiatives.

The solution

The IT team adopted an ITIL framework of best practices and implemented Freshservice—an ITIL-aligned service desk solution that was also cost-effective. SSA can manage IT tickets and cloud-based IT services via a user-friendly interface. By categorizing ticket requests, SSA agents can easily differentiate between incidents and service requests, allowing the IT team to prioritize the most critical issues quickly. 

“After comparing various ITSM solutions, Freshworks was chosen because it offered us the best value for the money,” says Marcos Aurélio do Amaral Jr., IT services coordinator at SSA.

Freshservice’s IT service catalog includes clear SLAs for each of the 180 service catalog items, providing transparency for employees. Apps and integrations available from the Freshworks Marketplace—including Docusign, MS Teams orchestration, and Azure DevOps—further enhance the efficiency of IT operations.

Additionally, Freshservice, powered by AWS, helps SSA maintain regulatory compliance by ensuring the company processes user information and establishes integrations in accordance with Brazil's General Data Protection Act (LGPD)—a comprehensive regulation governing the collection, handling, storage, and sharing of personal data.

Impact

Freshservice has made day-to-day operations simpler for both employees and IT staff members. Following its implementation, productivity increased, the volume of IT tickets decreased, duplicate tickets were minimized, and a self-service knowledge base was established with nearly 250 articles addressing frequently asked questions.

SSA has been able to reduce the number of incidents escalated to Tier 2 by 10% and achieved a 16% improvement in SLA resolution times, thanks to Freshservice’s incident management and self-service capabilities.

Intuitive dashboards from Freshservice allow SSA’s IT leadership to monitor critical KPIs and gain visibility into IT service performance. By analyzing metrics such as team response rates, bottlenecks, and peak ticket times, leaders can optimize IT staffing levels and workloads to ensure an excellent service experience.

And SSA isn’t stopping there: Building on the IT team’s success with Freshservice, SSA has expanded its use to other departments—including legal and marketing—to build a unified service delivery experience for its employees.