FS Case:
end-to-end automation without sacrificing the clean core

There is a quiet decision that separates technology projects that age badly from those that become a strategic asset. It almost never shows up in the business case, but it defines everything that follows: how much of the problem you solve inside the ERP core — and how much you solve outside of it.

FS crossed exactly this decision point. And the way it navigated it, alongside Exed, turned a critical operational process into a reference model for the industry. In the words of Fernando Hamrick, the company’s CIO, assessing the result: “we had a 70% reduction in processing time.” But the number, as we will see, is only the visible tip of a far deeper architectural choice.

Who FS is — and why the context matters

FS — Fueling Sustainability — is the first producer of ethanol and animal-nutrition ingredients made exclusively from corn, the third-largest ethanol producer in Brazil and the lowest-cost producer among the country’s largest. It carries sustainability in its very name, along with an ambition that captures the scale of the business: to become the world’s largest producer of carbon-negative fuel.

The operating figures help convey the magnitude of the underlying IT challenge: 5.4 million tons of corn processed, 2.4 billion liters of production capacity, 1.9 million tons of co-products and 657,000 MWh of electricity generated per year.

This scale is no market accident. Corn ethanol jumped from 520 million liters in 2017 to roughly 8.2 billion liters in the 2024/25 harvest — growth of more than 1,500% in less than a decade, according to the Brazilian Sugarcane and Bioenergy Industry Association (UNICA). For the 2025/26 harvest, Brazil’s National Supply Company (Conab) projects record output, with corn ethanol surpassing 10 billion liters and accounting for more than a quarter of all Brazilian ethanol. Unlike sugarcane, which is seasonal, corn allows year-round production — which brings regularity to supply, but also imposes a continuous rhythm on operations, with no off-season to “catch its breath.”

As Hamrick himself sums up the company’s position: “we are the pioneers in bringing corn ethanol to Brazil, ten years ago.” Being a pioneer in a sector growing at this pace means one thing for the technology team: operations cannot be the bottleneck to growth.

The context: fiscal and logistical complexity that won’t fit in a manual

FS operates in an environment of high logistical and fiscal complexity. Its intercompany chain integrates multiple production units and various distribution channels, with a high volume of transactions between group companies and a requirement for strict compliance with the sector’s regulations.

In practice, selling the ethanol it produced involved a long sequence of steps — creating sales orders, purchase orders, deliveries, invoices, value adjustments in yard management, freight generation — that depended on manual interaction and knowledge concentrated in a few people. It was a process with a low level of maturity and a high operational volume. The classic risk: an error in any link of the chain compromised delivery deadlines, service quality and fiscal compliance.

The challenge that reached the technology team, according to Hamrick, was direct: “how do we help the company implement a fully automated process to take this ethanol chain… and automate it completely, without embarking on a mega-complex project with a lot of customization in our core.”

That last sentence is the key to everything. This is the dilemma every CIO, COO and CFO recognizes. The easy way out would be to heavily customize the ERP until it did exactly what operations asked. It is the path that looks fastest — and it is also the one that creates the technical debt that imprisons the company years later. SAP is explicit about the cost of that choice: over time, ERP landscapes weighed down by custom code, undocumented changes and hard-to-maintain integrations lose flexibility, slow down upgrades and increase total cost of ownership. SAP’s own clean core strategy was created to solve precisely this: keep the core standardized and stable, and differentiate the business through extensions outside the core.

Gartner’s data underscores the urgency of the discipline: the firm projects that by 2027, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to fully meet the goals of their original business cases. Much of that failure is architectural — systems that become rigid precisely because they were forced into shape. FS chose the opposite path: back to standard. Reduce customizations, preserve adherence to the core, and pursue maximum automation with minimum manual friction.

The inflection point: the platform and the partnership

With the discipline defined — automate without bloating the core — the how remained. The answer was the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) as the central engine for automation and process orchestration. In the architecture SAP recommends, BTP is exactly the layer where innovation happens: side-by-side extensions, integrations and automation that run alongside the ERP, connected by APIs, without touching the core. It is the technical translation of the clean core.

But choosing the right platform does not dissolve the risk of being the first to walk a path. Hamrick is honest about the initial hesitation: “at first, we had some doubts about whether we should really take such an innovative route, given that we had nothing applied that way on SAP BTP.”

It was at this moment that Exed came in — and the nature of that entry is what set the project apart. Not as a vendor delivering custom software, but as an architecture partner. In the CIO’s words: “Exed proved to be not only a developer focused exclusively on delivering software specifically for us, but rather a partner that helped us architect a platform.” As the relationship matured, doubt gave way to the conviction that this was the right path — and that Exed was the right partner to walk it.

The solution: the E-Log Project

E-Log built a fully automated intercompany sell-order process, with end-to-end control and native fiscal integration. Instead of people manually stitching together each document, the flow began to automatically generate the sales order, the purchase order, the delivery and the invoice; to adjust values in yard management; to issue the freight order; and to record physical entry and virtual fiscal entry in the ECE — the Ethanol Trading Company — with no manual intervention at each step.

Three architectural decisions underpin the result:

• BTP as the orchestrator, with the core untouched. The intelligence of the process lives outside the ERP. The core remains standard, upgradeable and stable — consistent with the clean core strategy and with the stated goal of simplifying future updates and reducing maintenance cost.
• Experience distributed across 25 Fiori apps. The flow was broken down into clear, intuitive screens with a low level of manual interaction. The operator stops being the engine of the process and becomes its supervisor.
• Seamless integration across business, IT and tax. The three areas that usually operate in silos came to speak the same language within the same flow — which, in a process with so much tax exposure, is as important as the automation itself.

To convey the engineering behind the apparent simplicity: the project delivered 264 CDS views, 18 services, 7 includes and a process broken down into 62 steps (45 outbound and 17 inbound). All of it running on real volumes — about 380,000 m³ across total operations, moved by more than 6,300 trucks, of which roughly 35,000 m³ in the export process.

The results: the CIO’s own reading

“It was a project that brought significant gains to FS, and I would separate those gains into three major blocks,” says Hamrick. It is worth following his structure, because it maps precisely onto the three executive stakeholders in the case — the CFO, the COO and the CIO.

1. Enabling a new operation (the CFO’s reading). The first gain is not efficiency — it is revenue and margin. With the automated operation, 100% of the producer’s volume began to be processed through the ECE, enabling ICMS (state VAT) credit on freight and directly optimizing EBITDA. In other words: technology unlocked a fiscal arrangement that was previously unfeasible to operate at scale. This is the kind of gain that shows up in the company’s financial results, not just in the IT report.

2. Productivity (the COO’s reading). A process that took, on average, 15 minutes is now completed in four to five. In the export process, the reduction in the time to create the document flow reached 70%. Adding up the gains over the year, that came to more than 20,000 hours of optimized time — operational capacity freed up without hiring a single additional person.

3. Scalability (the CIO’s reading). This is the most technical part and, perhaps, the most strategic. FS avoided nearly 12,000 hours of development within its own core and reduced by 66% the developments that existed in its SAP — two out of every three simply ceased to exist. More than 90% of customizations moved to live outside the core. “We avoided nearly 12,000 hours of development within our core,” the CIO summarizes. The process gained traceability and online monitoring of what is happening, fully integrated and synchronous with the core.

SAP estimates that around 70% of business processes can be standardized and automated under a clean core strategy, with faster upgrades and lower operating costs. E-Log is a concrete demonstration of that principle applied to a mission-critical process.

The future: a foundation, not a project

The most underestimated gain of a clean architecture is what it enables afterward. The platform built for E-Log did not just solve the operation that was on the table at that moment — it left the foundation ready for the next ones. Every new operation FS wants to automate now starts from a higher baseline, reusing what already exists instead of starting from scratch.

It is the difference between buying a solution and building a capability. Scalability stopped being a slide-deck promise and became an architectural feature: FS can grow without operating cost rising in the same proportion. In a sector expanding at double digits per year, that is not a comfort — it is a competitive advantage.

Exed’s role

What Exed delivered was not software; it was an architecture and a reference model. Combining sector experience with mastery of SAP BTP projects made it possible to turn a critical — and fiscally sensitive — process into a replicable standard for the industry. The role was that of someone who designs the foundation so it can support not only today’s building, but the floors still to come.

Hamrick’s closing remark captures the value of the partnership better than any isolated metric: “from the standpoint of innovation, governance, controls and scale — which was our main target — achieving our objectives… Exed helped us with that.”

What the FS case teaches

For an executive, the lesson of E-Log is not about ethanol or about BTP. It is about a choice of principle: the best way to automate a critical process is rarely to bend the ERP until it fits the operation. It is to keep the core clean and move complexity to a layer built to change.

When that discipline is respected, the three gains of the FS case stop being the exception and become the rule: unlocked margin for the CFO, freed capacity for the COO and avoided technical debt for the CIO. Innovation, governance and scale need not be competing objectives. With the right architecture, they are the same objective.