New York City, NY. April 9th, 2003. iProcess has won the Gold Award for the 2003 Global Excellence Awards for innovation and excellence in workflow. The award is based on iProcess workflow implementation and the cultural changes brought to Sonae Distribuição Brasil. The awards are sponsored jointly by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), Giga Information Group and the Workflow And Reengineering International Association (WARIA), and were announced on April 8th at the AIIM 2003 Conference and Exposition, the premier enterprise content management event.

A set of 12 workflow systems was developed for Sonae Distribuição Brasil (SDB), the third biggest retail group of Brazil. Its primary focus was based on cost control but later workflow technology expanded to the point of establishing a new management corporation paradigm.

SDB intended to improve the processes management, especially for the processes initiated in the stores. In a scattered and geographically dispersed organization as SDB, the flow of processes in paper could represent an obstacle to productivity, efficiency and control. There was an interest in avoiding a situation where the headquarters would loose information concerning to the stores. Also, imperfections were barely noticed during the manual processes. When the process of expenses was made manually, expenses happened to be made before its approval or products ended up being sold by a price lower than its original cost. SDB needed a better balance between store autonomy and headquarters control, to monitor and avoid these situations, reducing the risk of failures.

The first workflow system started its development in January 2002, and was put into production in April 2002. Oracle was the workflow development and deployment platform chosen. The expressive results achieved stimulated the development of new systems, reaching the mark of 12 systems in production on March, 2003. The implemented systems range from Travel Management to Expenses Control. Other administrative tasks control involve Project Management and Sales Campaign.

All the developed systems brought benefits to SDB, representing thousands of dollars and hours savings. The workflow systems made it possible to conciliate the operational autonomy needed by the stores with the maintenance of the headquarters global control. This new scenario represented several tangible effects, such as control of the costs, agility (many processes were reduced by 50% or more of its total processing time), security in decision making, elimination of failures and better customer support.

The achieved outcome was way beyond the expected, resulting in significant savings for the company. This, added to the enthusiastic acceptance of the technology by the users, placed the workflow technology as an essential tool for the company management.

The Portuguese company that owns SDB is very interested in workflow technology, intending to reproduce in Portugal what was done in Brazil. There is a strong possibility of expanding workflow technology not only in SDB but to other, maybe many, Grupo Sonae enterprises.

Thus, the current experience of SDB presents much more than only the technical and economic viability of the use of workflow technology in wide scale. It shows the creation of a new and powerful philosophy of work in the corporation. This philosophy, stimulated by strong user participation, places SDB in the front line, becoming more efficient and competitive every day.

About iProcess Soluções em Tecnologia
Created in July 2000, iProcess Soluções em Tecnologia has the aim of providing advanced technology solutions. Its goal is to serve large corporations in facing the challenges of process management. iProcess leads its clients to new horizons of productivity, increasing the companies agility, making them more organized and more efficient. This is achieved through innovative technologies such as Workflow, Content Management and Enterprise Application Integration. IProcess managers are experts in the study and implementation of the workflow technology. iProcess is an Oracle Partner, pioneer in the use of its techonologies in this area.

About SDB
Sonae Distribuição Brasil currently has 166 stores distributed in 62 cities in four southern states of the country, with its headquarters in Porto Alegre. It belongs to the Grupo Sonae, the biggest non-financial private group of Portugal. The Grupo Sonae operates in many areas, such as retail, lumber, real estate, telecommunications and venture capital. The company operates in more than 15 countries in four continents.

About Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is the world’s largest enterprise software provider. For further information about Oracle, please visit http://www.oracle.com.

About WfMC
The Workflow Management Coalition, founded in August 1993, is a non-profit, international organization of workflow vendors, users, analysts and university/research groups. The Coalition's mission is to promote and develop the use of workflow through the establishment of standards for software terminology, interoperability and connectivity between workflow products. Consisting of over 200 members, spread throughout the world, the Coalition has quickly become established as the primary standards body for this rapidly expanding software market.

About Giga
Giga Information Group provides objective research, advice and continuous coaching on technology for e-Business. Giga's integrated suite of offerings helps clients make strategic decisions about the technologies, people and processes needed to excel in the new digital economy. Emphasizing close interaction between analysts and clients, Giga delivers support with the speed and scope necessary for e-Business. The company, founded by Gideon I. Gartner, began providing services in April 1996 and now has a global client base encompassing more than 1,100 organizations and over 120,000 licensed users, making it the fastest growing company in the IT advisory industry's history. Giga's enterprise clients include companies that use, sell and invest in technology.

About WARIA
The charter of the Workflow And Reengineering International Association is to identify and clarify issues that are common to all users of workflow and those who are in the process of reengineering their organizations. WARIA's mission is to make sense of what's happening at the intersection of Business Process Reengineering, Workflow, Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce and reach clarity through sharing experiences, product evaluations, networking between users and vendors, education and training.

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