A Brazilian family group of four businesses - paper, energy, forestry, and agribusiness - Santa Maria uses IFS ERP as the backbone serving every one of them.
Santa Maria is a Brazilian family group with sixty-four years of history and four principal businesses: white paper manufacturing, three hydroelectric plants, commercial forestry, and grain agribusiness. IFS ERP serves all four transversally, giving leadership a single view of a corporation that once had to be understood one business at a time.
Integrated View
An integrated view across all four businesses, in one place
ERP Backbone
One ERP serving paper, energy, forestry, and agribusiness
Years With IFS
Two decades of group growth supported by IFS technology
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The Santa Maria Group is a family group with sixty-four years of existence, built around four principal businesses: a paper factory producing white paper, an energy business with three hydroelectric plants, a reforestation business growing forests for timber production, and an agribusiness operation focused on grain crops such as corn and soy.
Each of those businesses behaves differently. As Luciano Cebula, Business Technology Manager at Santa Maria, explains, "Each business has its own characteristics; while the factory has a manufacturing area, the energy area has a completely different market control, and the reforestation and agro areas also require different controls."
Four operating models meant four sets of processes, measures, and definitions of good performance - and results that had to be read four times over, one business at a time. When the group went looking for new software, the brief was not to modernize a department. It was to find a system capable of serving all four operations at once, in a complete way.
The shortlist was defined by breadth. Santa Maria set out to identify which ERP vendors could genuinely handle manufacturing, finance, and costs across four highly differentiated operations, then chose the one whose product plan pointed in the same direction as the group's own ambitions.
The Santa Maria Group is a family group with sixty-four years of existence, headquartered in Guarapuava, in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil. It is organized around four principal businesses. The first is paper: a paper factory producing white paper. The second is energy, where the group operates three hydroelectric plants. The third is reforestation, where forests are grown for timber production. The fourth is agribusiness, working mainly with the cultivation of grains such as corn and soy.
The four arms arrived at different points in the group's history, and each stands on its own commercially. What began as an industrial company now spans generation assets, plantations, and agriculture - a broad footprint for a family-owned business, and an unusually varied one to steer from the center.
Diversity of this kind resists a single management model. Manufacturing discipline governs the paper plant, where output is measured in tonnes and machine time. Energy answers to a completely different form of market control, shaped by generation and trading rather than production runs. Forestry works to horizons measured in growing seasons and hectares. Agribusiness moves with the planting calendar.
None of those disciplines translates cleanly into another, and the group's technology had to accommodate all four without flattening what makes each one work. Tying those threads together was what sent Santa Maria to market: it needed one solution capable of serving every operation properly, not a patchwork that handled one area well and the rest approximately.
Cebula, who brings around thirty years of experience in the field, treated the selection as a long-term commitment rather than a purchase. "Choosing an ERP partner is a very important and strategic decision," he says. "More than talking about the present and the past, you need to understand what you want for your company in the future."
That framing shaped the questions Santa Maria asked. Which vendors could carry every business at the same time? Whose roadmap anticipated growth and new technology over the years ahead? Cebula is emphatic that this calls for a frank conversation with partners, the kind that tests intent rather than features. IFS, already two decades into the relationship, could answer on both counts.
Today, the ERP functions as "the backbone of the company," serving all businesses transversally. Santa Maria draws on many modules, from manufacturing, through supply, finance, and tax, so the same system underpins a production line, a generation asset, a plantation, and a harvest.
Support arrives through both routes available in Brazil, with the group working directly with IFS and through partners. Cebula is candid that partnerships can always run into difficulties, and says accessibility is what settles them. "The main point is the openness that IFS provides here in the Brazilian market, where we can talk to everyone; in case of a problem, we can align and have the solution to these problems in a fast and agile way." Portosys works alongside IFS as a very important partner in daily operations, close at hand whenever something needs clarifying or fixing.
Ask Cebula what changed most, and the answer is not a process metric. It is perspective. "Today we can look at the corporation as a whole and can see the results of all these operations in an integrated way," he says. "Something we wouldn't have been able to do before."
He names that as the main advantage the group gained. Where performance once had to be assembled business by business, leadership can now weigh the paper plant, the hydroelectric assets, the forests, and the farmland against each other - and against the corporation they collectively make up.
The relationship has now run long enough that IFS predates parts of the group it serves. Energy is the clearest illustration: a pillar of the business today, added while the same technology partner was already in place. For Cebula, that history proves something specific - a partner able to absorb not only the present but the future as well.
The next chapter is already mapped. IFS Apps10 means the group is not yet drawing on everything the tool offers around artificial intelligence, and the planned move to IFS Cloud is what brings those capabilities within reach. It follows the same logic that guided the original decision, which is why Cebula's advice to others considering the choice is straightforward: "You can trust IFS, which is a very important partner for the growth of your company."
See how other leading businesses are using IFS to gain control, reduce risk, and deliver at scale.
