Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 58 | Page 59

CASE STUDY BRF, one of the largest food companies in the world with 34 manufacturing plants in Brazil and another five abroad, is on a mission to offer increasingly tastier, good-quality and practical food to people around the globe through the sustainable management of a vivid, long and complex supply chain that provides everyone with a better life. Headquartered in Brazil with a solid 90,000 employee workforce working out of 130 countries, more than 250,000 clients and millions of customers globally, the food multinational is not new in the Middle East, having established its footprint in the 1970s. The company’s main brand of frozen chicken Sadia, is the market leader in the poultry category and is recognised as the preferred brand across the Middle East. In the GCC markets, BRF operates and follows its ‘farm to table’ approach with a fully integrated value chain, offering a wide range of quality products comprising whole chicken, chicken parts and ready to prepare products. In 2016, BRF consolidated OneFoods, a subsidiary that positions BRF to be a leading food multinational in Islamic markets and with a high consumer preference. Over the years, BRF Sadia has grown its operations in Saudi Arabia and following the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has partially revamped its IT infrastructure which has been leveraged to facilitate a full-scale shift of over 10,000 employees to a work from home (WFH) model. Cristiano Possato, Head of IT, International Markets at BRF Sadia, said the Coronavirus pandemic has created challenges that only a handful of people could have imagined a few short months ago. “The pandemic has drastically and radically changed the way we work and where we work. At BRF Sadia, all corporate functions and more than 10,000 employees across all countries in the world where we operate in have been migrated to a WFH model. This has posed a common challenge for the IT team, that is, how to enable and empower the team to fully function from outside the office parameters, while retaining the same level of security and performance? Thankfully, the governance and architecture to enable this mammoth operation was already in place.” AI IS A NEW LANGUAGE FOR US AND ONE THAT WE ARE KEEN TO LEARN. WE ARE COMMITTED TO DAILY LEARNING AND DISCOVERY OF THE VARIOUS APPLICATIONS WHERE AI CAN BENEFIT OUR COMPANY AND THE ENTIRE OPERATIONS. Possato said a few years ago, the company had initiated a project to partially revamp its IT infrastructure which was leveraged to facilitate a full-scale shift of over 10,000 www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 59