“The People First Approach to Scaling a Multi-Billion Dollar Company”

Unlike most COOs, Rodrigo Santos, COO of Softplan, has a somewhat different background. For many years he worked directly with clients building and developing new businesses and diving deep into the nuances of each market. When he took over the role of COO, he was able to connect operations with the strategy and business needs in an innovative way. As per Rodrigo, a common problem of large operations is the disconnect between the customers' businesses and the cultures, which are often endogenous. “As I have always been very in touch with the market, I was able to bring a feeling of "ownership" to the heart of the operation for the leaders and employees,” says Rodrigo. “When the team really understands the impact of what they deliver to the customer's life, the level of engagement rises dramatically, especially when the company works with public and government institutions.” In the case of Softplan, ensuring quality products means improving people's lives through the evolution of services provided by the government, by using transformative technologies. Consequently, it has been possible to increase Softplan's revenue by almost 150 percent in 7 years and reach new highs for customer satisfaction of products and services.

"Softplan has ambitious growth plans, like any large world-class company. They have started Softplan's internationalization process and they have a very robust mergers and acquisitions plan."

Rodrigo graduated in Law, with specializations in Economics and also has an MBA in Management. “This year I am finishing a Masters in International Business, and consider myself a plural professional, as I have already worked in very different areas: business development, commerce, strategy, consultancy, institutional coordination,” he adds. “This permanent curiosity compels me to seek a strategic, complete vision of the organizations in which I work. This is one of the reasons why I have always managed to transform the environments I have been through, promoting exponential growth.”

As per Rodrigo, digital transformation is deeply rooted in Softplan’s culture. “We are a company that was born 30 years ago and was already promoting transformations. Just go back in time and imagine how people worked: the focus was always on paper,” he explains. “When we started to create technologies that could replace paper, so as to offer more agility and quality to the services provided to the public, we also started to push this paradigm shift in the institutions that adopted our systems.” Softplan’s founding principal is taking this new culture to sectors linked to the fundamental rights of every member of society: access to justice, quality public services, adequate housing, and, more recently, better management of health programs. From the moment that an institution adopts one of Softplan’s technologies, they are taking measures to better serve the public. And this is not just a simple exchange of paper for technology. Today, with their systems already well-established, each in their respective ecosystems - Construction Industry, Public Management and Justice - Softplan conducts research and evolves their technologies so that this digital transformation is not finite.

Softplan is careful to form multidisciplinary high-performance teams. Of their 1.8 thousand employees, 40 percent work directly in the development and evolution of their technologies. “However, the service and business teams work in synergy so that we deliver results to customers creating meaning in their work. This avoids any reworking and improves our relationship with the users of our systems,” adds Rodrigo. “Another good practice that we have adopted for years is calling upon our customers to support us in the construction of new features and updates.”

Softplan has ambitious growth plans, like any large, world-class company. They have started Softplan's internationalization process and they have a very robust mergers and acquisitions plan. The objective is to expand Softplan’s production and service capacity, focusing on the quality of what they deliver. One of the premises for this is to have the best professionals in the market. “Among so many things that qualify Softplan as a market leader, we have a solid talent capture strategy based on our culture of innovation,” says Rodrigo. “The greatest thing we offer our employees is the possibility of creating and promoting unparalleled transformations in society.”IE