From its beginnings in 1950 as a modest soap factory in Amparo, Brazil, Ypê has built a legacy of quality and care that now touches more than 95% of Brazilian homes. Today, Ypê’s brand is woven into daily life, trusted for its detergents, surface cleaners, fabric conditioners, dish soaps and personal hygiene products.
Its commitment to helping families live better, healthier and happier lives remains at the center of every decision. “Our big vision is a company without friction. A company with a good experience for our employees, customers and stakeholders alike,” Ypê CIO, Geraldo Pereira, shared. “We are always looking at inventive ways to engage our consumers with high quality personal care products, and are leveraging new and emerging technologies to help us deliver the best goods at the best prices. And that means removing friction points that can impact our top and bottom line growth.”
Eliminating order-to-cash process friction
An area of business Ypê sought to improve was the order-to-cash process that runs on its SAP platform. With more than 22,000 B2B customers and 400 product SKUs, the order-to-cash process touches almost every corner of the business. Within this process lies the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) flow, where orders occasionally arrive with price discrepancies, creating exceptions that require additional processing. The added processing effort affected its general and administrative (G&A) costs and its On-time In-Full (OTIF) delivery rate. “OTIF is critical for our customers. When our products are ordered, there is no exceptions when it comes to delivering the goods on time, and in the quantity requested. It’s our brand commitment and reputation at stake,” Pereira explained.
Previously, resolving these exceptions required manual checks and handoffs, and the process lacked visibility for sales representatives and customers. The organization needed faster notifications and cleaner data for decision-making.
With an advanced degree in AI, Pereira understood the potential of intelligent process flows to increase efficiency, enhance order visibility and improve data hygiene, leading to faster processing, improved productivity and increased customer satisfaction. However, AI projects require large upfront investments, have long lead times to achieve results and require a multi-platform approach. SAP offered an AI solution, but Pereira needed a more holistic approach.
“We have four workstreams around AI. The first is increased sales, the second is no friction in the total experience for our employees and our customers, and then ESG and controlling G&A costs.” Specifically, Pereira noted, “The SAP strategy wasn’t good for us because the embedded AI only applies to the ERP, and our vision is AI across the entire enterprise for true impact.”
Achieving fast, tangible results with Rimini Agentic UX™
Ypê, already familiar with Rimini Street’s ERP expertise as a current Rimini Support™ client for its SAP systems, was introduced to Rimini Agentic UX™, Rimini Street’s intelligent, AI-driven user engagement layer that streamlines ERP processes for speed of execution and significant savings.
“Rimini Street knows ERP and ERP processes better than anyone,” said Pereira. “When Rimini Street announced it was launching a new Agentic UX product, we were enthused to be the first round of clients to try it out. And we’re so glad that we did. The benefits are incredible.”
The Rimini Consult™ team performed in-depth discovery sessions with the Ypê team to design a persona-based workflow for EDI Resolution within its order-to-cash process to:
- Synchronize blocked orders from SAP to ServiceNow making them instantly visible to sales representatives
- Send email notifications to sales representatives with options to record decisions directly from the email
- Implement an Agentic AI workflow to analyze historical data and recommend corrective actions, such as adjusting prices or canceling items
- Provide automatic updates to SAP eliminating the need for manual intervention
Pereira was impressed with the results. “Before Rimini Agentic UX, we had eight steps across customer service, sales and other departments. Now, it’s simply two. That’s powerful time savings,” he said.
The new workflow is expected to deliver dramatic results:
- 80% reduction in exception handling time: Transitioning from a manual exception handling process to an automated, AI-enabled workflow eliminates manual monitoring and communication effort.
- 60% reduction in approval processing: Sales representatives empowered with data and recommendations to resolve price discrepancies without specialist intervention accelerates order processing, improves decision accuracy and reduces lost sales risks.
- 100% audit readiness: The system now creates an audit trail of actions and status updates for real-time process status transparency replacing manual follow-ups, increasing accountability and strengthening compliance.
Pereira shared, “At Ypê, we have several AI projects in works, but the Rimini Agentic UX™ project has outperformed them all in both speed and expectations. It only took one month from start to delivery, and this will help us reduce our approval cycle by 60% and accelerate time-to-value. It’s a great win for our IT team.”
Building an enterprise-wide AI strategy
By implementing AI across the enterprise, Ypê is able to unlock value across its entire business, rather than keeping it siloed in its ERP applications.
“SAP thinks only about the SAP environment, but Rimini Street thinks about all the integrations,” said Pereira. “AI is democratizing technological innovation advancement and making everything much faster. The traditional ERP model doesn’t fit with that. I don’t have an advantage from ERP alone, but when using ERP plus AI across the enterprise, I now have a major advantage.”
As they continue to monitor success metrics from the project, like OTIF, NPS, exception processing times and G&A costs, Ypê is able to immediately see the impact of the saved processing time. “The project cut out a lot of G&A tasks through automation. We intend to reinvest that saved time and resources into other strategic projects.”
Big wins without big investments
“This project was successful for us because it was very simple, very fast,” Pereira said. In fact, the speed to value reshaped how Ypê thinks about future AI investments. “Rimini Street is a true AI strategy partner because they work seamlessly with our CRM, ERP, HR systems, and so on. We were able to achieve our AI goals very fast, and without high costs or disruption to the business.”
Pereira’s philosophy is to look for outcomes, not outputs, when it comes to AI. With Rimini Agentic UX, he was able to deliver back to the business, rapid, meaningful outcomes that align to his goals of frictionless experiences for employees, customers and stakeholders. His advice to other IT leaders pursuing agentic AI initiatives is clear, “You can try agentic AI right now – without big migrations, without big investments – with Rimini Street.”
Our solutions for Ypê
Receive comprehensive enterprise software support from a proven provider. Whether you need issue resolution, performance tuning or regulatory compliance, you can trust Rimini Support™ to deliver.
With Rimini Support, you gain:
- Support for customizations not covered by the vendor
- The strength and knowledge of hundreds of seasoned engineers on your team, but not on your payroll
- Potential savings of up to 90% of total support costs
Attain world-class IT consulting services from the experts you know and trust. Resolve your most challenging IT issues, including security, interoperability and integration with targeted solutions.
With Rimini Consult™, you gain:
- Improved performance of your ERP investments, maximizing their potential
- Guidance to optimize, evolve and transform your systems for greater ROI
- The ability to plan, staff and launch bespoke projects that fit your budget and timeline
Rimini Agentic UX is a persona-based, AI-powered intelligent workspace that seamlessly integrates on top of any ERP system. With Rimini Agentic UX, you don’t have to go through a long, expensive and risky ERP upgrade or replatforming process just to get access to AI features.
Rimini Agentic UX delivers a modern user experience your existing ERP in weeks, rather years, so you can streamline processes, improve productivity and lower total operating costs for increased profitability.
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