Grupo Casais: Scaling new heights in productivity and efficiency through enterprise automation
Grupo Casais connects technology of the past to the future
In an industry slow to adopt industrialization principles, construction company Grupo Casais is leading the way. Using SAP Business Technology Platform at the center of its digital ecosystem, the company simplified connecting legacy technology and automated process improvements with SAP Integration Suite and the SAP Build Process Automation solution.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Construction and real estate | Braga, Portugal | 5,962 employees |
work report workflow processing time, down from 30 minutes.
increased productivity from automation.
automation implementation time.
Corporate CIO, Grupo Casais
Breaking new ground in sustainable construction processes
Grupo Casais is one of the largest construction companies in Portugal, with operations on four continents. Established in 1958 as a family-owned enterprise, the organization is currently run and managed by second- and third-generation family members.
Over the course of more than six decades, Grupo Casais cemented its prominent position in the fields of civil construction and public works, trades and industry, and real estate and asset management. Its international expansion, which started in 1994, now accounts for more than 80% of the company’s global turnover.
With ongoing disruption in the construction industry combined with traditional practices that slow productivity and efficiency, Grupo Casais recentered its purpose on sustainability in the construction of a better tomorrow. Setting its focus on innovating more sustainable practices, Grupo Casais needed to build a foundational technology infrastructure that enabled it to break new ground in construction processes – now and in the future.
This commitment to pioneering industry change and sustainability allows the company to operate with the true conviction that innovation is a value driver for the organization and for society, allowing it to realize sustainable advantages.
Connecting legacy apps and the future through SAP BTP
Grupo Casais built the cornerstone of its modern business foundation by consolidating and harmonizing the operations of more than 150 companies across 17 countries on a single instance of SAP S/4HANA. It also reshaped people management on an ecosystem of SAP SuccessFactors solutions and is modernizing project management with the SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management package. When it came to transforming its finance operations, it combined the SAP Cash and Liquidity Management and SAP Treasury and Risk Management applications with planning capabilities in the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. Grupo Casais also adopted SAP Concur solutions and the SAP Invoice Management application by OpenText. This setup allows the company to smoothly process invoices in any country.
In terms of industrializing traditional processes in the construction industry, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) plays a critical role at the center of the company’s digital ecosystem. On SAP BTP, Grupo Casais can elevate innovation know-how with access to modern services for data and analytics, artificial intelligence, application development, automation, and integration in one unified environment. Using SAP Integration Suite and the SAP Build Process Automation solution – both part of SAP BTP – enables the company to connect technology of the past, present, and future and enhance processes with automation. Likewise, with the SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere solutions, also on SAP BTP, the company can centralize data modeling and discovery while optimizing visualization and analytics.
Guilherme Teixeira, corporate CIO at Grupo Casais, comments, “SAP BTP helps us in three ways. First, it’s the glue that connects our technology ecosystem, not just inside our company but beyond it to third parties. Second, it’s the automation that’s very important nowadays; and since we are connecting the dots with partners, automation is a must. And third, it’s a technology that users can learn quickly. We can prepare an engineer, who has no prior experience using SAP Build Process Automation, to become proficient within one month.”
Grupo Casais’ innovative use case for SAP Build Process Automation is described later in this story and illustrated in the diagram below.
Corporate CIO, Grupo Casais
Championing productivity from enterprise automation
Grupo Casais is leading the way in using technology to help industrialize construction processes and, in turn, reduce construction time, minimize construction risks, and strengthen on-time delivery while minimizing construction’s impact on the environment.
Teixeira elaborates on how using SAP Integration Suite supports Grupo Casais in its approach to innovation. “It’s not just about integrating everything. It’s about being compatible with everything, and that can be highly demanding when considering legacy applications. With SAP Integration Suite, we have tools to simplify connecting with critical legacy applications.”
This approach sees Grupo Casais performing months of planning and production away from the construction site before rigorously managing project execution over a matter of days. In fact, the company can now construct a new building at the rate of one floor per day.
In terms of enterprise processes, Grupo Casais used SAP Build Process Automation to digitalize its monthly reports on construction progress validated by engineers that trigger invoices to customers and the approval of invoices from suppliers. Before automation, each report would typically take around 30 minutes to execute. Using the SAP Build Process Automation solution on SAP BTP, Grupo Casais shrunk the processing time to just one minute.
Teixeira comments, “We’ve now got the process executing in one minute, when it used to take up to half an hour. And as we run that process about 5,000 times per month, this gives us a substantial productivity and efficiency boost. We built this automation with just four weeks of learning and four weeks of development. This is such a very different approach from the past, when we’d expect to spend many months implementing a development like this.”
As a construction company with a large number of suppliers, integration with business partners is critical. So, in another major improvement, Grupo Casais automated master data management of business partner data by connecting this data to its ecosystem of SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and third-party legacy applications using SAP Integration Suite. For integrations with older applications, such as its contingent workforce management solution, it created robotic process automation bots built with SAP Build Process Automation to validate data, manage exceptions, and fill process gaps. This helped the company create a consistent architecture connecting contingent workforce data from this legacy app with SAP S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors, giving it one location to manage and support its external workforce around the world.
With just two weeks needed to implement the automation to digitalize master data management tasks that were previously handled manually, Grupo Casais has increased productivity by 90%. Teixeira adds, “End-to-end business processes are crucial for us. With consistent enterprise architecture, even for applications that can’t be connected through APIs, we can use SAP Build Process Automation to fill that process gap.”
Corporate CIO, Grupo Casais
Adopting AI technology to stay ahead
With an eye to the future, Grupo Casais is looking to activate business process transformation by performing process analyses using SAP Signavio solutions. The company is also exploring the use of AI, which it labels as a game changer and critical for the future. The company is conducting workshops with end users and looking to integrate the Joule capability with back-office processes to stabilize data quality, further improve its processes, and deliver quality insights for the business.