Success stories

MES system

Danone

Danone's infant formula production plant requires a high level of quality in both the product and the manufacturing process, in compliance with strict internationally recognized standards. To meet that requirement, DANONE BABY NUTRITION asked DESBA S.A. to develop a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), known internally at the plant as "Kawsay" (a Quechua word meaning "life").

The system was originally developed for Kasdorf, interfacing with the plant's systems. When Danone acquired Kasdorf, the logical decision would have been to replace it with the production system Danone already used at its plant in France — but given the proven efficiency of DESBA's MES, they decided to keep it instead. Since then, the system has been interfaced first with Oracle, then with SAP, and later reintegrated with Oracle, without ever being replaced.

As a result of the project, Danone now has a MES system that lets the plant connect, manage and command its mixing systems through PLC connections, so the system is responsible for starting and stopping mixing cycles, controlling sequences, speeds and timing, as well as controlling and running cleaning cycles.

The MES system connects to digital scales, controlling that the weight of every input matches what's required by the formulas, ensuring the quality of the production process.

During the packaging cycle, the MES system tracks the byproduct discharged into hoppers, counting cans loaded in real time and recording, for each one: weight, date, time, batch, production order, byproduct, inputs, operators, etc.

The front end fully supports touch-screen operation, making the system faster and more intuitive to use.

Traceability: The system keeps rigorous control of sequences, loads, input usage, load and mixing processes, and even pallet declarations. This makes it possible to know exactly which batches were used at any given time, on which equipment, which operators were involved, and how long each stage took.

Real time: The system displays production evolution and efficiency graphs in real time. It shows whether the speed performance of each part of the process is above or below defined thresholds.

Return on investment: The plant was able to quantify, in monetary terms, the reduction in losses compared to before the MES was installed — losses previously caused by the destruction of expired batches, the loss of entire production batches due to human error, and a lack of control over waste and scrap.

Simulator: A production simulator that allows staff training and lets the team observe how changes to cycles, processes or equipment are reflected in the production process.

Procurement and budget control system

Tierra del Fuego Port

The procurement cycle at the Tierra del Fuego Port requires strict control regulations and specific guidelines for making purchases, and also requires explicit proof of compliance.

Purchases require a full control cycle: from project approval, the reservation of budget-line funds, requests for quotes, awarding, receipt of supplier invoices, payment release, and budget control, among others. All of this consumed a lot of staff time and required a high degree of focus to guarantee compliance.

They needed a system to control and speed up communication between every area involved in the complex procurement and awarding process. The Port asked DESBA S.A. to develop a budgeting system that would meet these requirements.

The system built for the Port keeps full control of the process, from project creation through payment of each award.

The awarding cycle manages a single project and requests quotes from vendors by category for each item to be quoted, simplifying project control under a single budget line.

The system also manages the documentation provided by vendors: drawings, quotes, images, invoices, etc. Receipt of vendor invoices is checked item by item against the purchase orders generated by the system itself.

Due to non-compliance or at the Port's discretion, awards can be revoked and re-awarded to other vendors for specific project items without losing traceability of the process. The system interacts with the Port's accounting system, generating equity and budget accounting entries.

Traceability: The full procurement process follows the exact workflow defined by the Port, from drafting the project through issuing payments. All these operations are logged by date, time and staff involved.

Return on investment: Faster analysis of a procurement cycle, avoiding constant use of paper files and folders, and speeding up the approval process, all have a strong impact on response times when starting new projects.

Centralized transaction database

Walmart Argentina

Sales tickets are spread across the different stores nationwide, stored in NCR point-of-sale proprietary formats.

Consulting sales centrally, minute by minute, isn't feasible unless there are processes that analyze each ticket to break down data such as taxes, discounts and promotions, and group it by department, store, date, etc.

This all required modeling a unified database that would incorporate every transaction, designed for information analysis and, from there, the generation of management reports. Walmart hired DESBA S.A. for that project.

The solution DESBA proposed analyzes ticket by ticket, breaking down items sold, taxes, discounts, promotions, payment methods, cashiers, register, time, etc.

The process analyzes an average of 200 tickets per second and stores the detailed information in a centralized database, which serves as the data source for a wide range of reports.

Real time: The system processes more than 200 tickets per second, keeping sales centralized minute by minute. The company has the most up-to-date information to track events and promotions at every moment.

Sales volume: The company can now compare actual sales in stores and departments against planned targets for each calendar day, tracking goal achievement in real time.

Sales comparison: With historical data stored, the system allows comparing sales between different dates or events, both in units sold and in amounts and tickets issued.

Payment methods: Minute by minute, the system shows sales amounts and their respective payment methods, breaking them down by card, issuer, store, etc.

DBA optimization and performance

VER

Everything was slow: processes such as month-end close, monthly report preparation, data preparation for reporting, and archiving and purging of historical data took more than 8 hours.

Servers were collapsing in memory, CPU and disk usage.

DESBA provides advisory, analysis and design of DBA management solutions, including performance analysis of the server, the databases and the applications.

The analyses make it possible to understand the tasks required at the hardware level (physical or virtual), adjustments to the data model and data types, index optimization, and changes to application flows or operations.

We support the whole process across infrastructure, DBA and development, so every area is advised and technically supported throughout the proposed improvement plan.

Infrastructure savings: the improvements reduce the use of valuable resources such as CPU and memory.

Process time savings: the time required for the same processes dropped by more than 70%.

Backup costs: backups now take less time and less space, and even allow a longer retention period.

Transactions, BI, RPA and application support

Changomás

Changomás, a supermarket chain, needed to centralize sales information from its stores, with tickets spread across branches and stored in point-of-sale systems.

Besides a unified database designed for analysis, it required Business Intelligence tools to exploit that information, automation of repetitive operational tasks, and specialized resources to sustain and evolve its systems.

Centralized transaction database: DESBA implemented for Changomás a ticket-by-ticket analysis solution that breaks down items, taxes, discounts, promotions and payment methods into a centralized database.

Business Intelligence: management reports and dashboards on top of the centralized data.

RPA: automation of repetitive operational processes with software robots.

Application and process support: a service with specialized DESBA resources embedded in Changomás's teams, at a considerably larger scale than for other clients in the sector.

Centralized information: sales from all stores are consolidated and ready for analysis.

Data-driven decisions: BI reports make it possible to track performance by store, department and period.

Operational efficiency: RPA automation frees up team time from repetitive tasks.

Capacity on demand: the support service adds DESBA technical capacity according to the needs of each stage.

AI Conversational Assistant

Laboratorios ELEA — Compañero de Ruta

Medical sales reps at Laboratorios ELEA spend a large part of their time digging through the commercial dashboard, prescription history and their own notes to answer simple questions: what a doctor has been prescribing, how a brand's market share is trending, when the last visit happened. That time doesn't go toward the conversation with the doctor or toward logging the visit quickly.

DESBA built Compañero de Ruta ("Road Companion"), a voice-and-text conversational assistant for medical reps that answers natural-language questions about their territory by querying, in real time, a read-only copy of ELEA's commercial data mart (13 tables, ~115,800 rows): the doctors in the rep's portfolio with specialty and loyalty segment, prescriptions from the last few months by doctor and product, market share by brand, visit history going back to 2024, the visit schedule, samples delivered, and a catalog of over 1,200 in-house and competitor products.

The assistant combines voice recognition and synthesis with reasoning powered by Anthropic's Claude. When a question isn't covered by its predefined queries, it writes its own SQL query under read-only permissions, validation, and a time limit — avoiding the evasive answers typical of other conversational assistants.

Conversational access: The rep asks by voice or text for whatever they need to know about their territory, without opening the dashboard or searching through spreadsheets, in the middle of their visit schedule.

Auditable answers: Every conversation is logged together with the SQL query it ran, making it possible to audit that every answer it gives is accurate against the database.

Agile development: The system was developed over seven weeks and deployed with real data for one rep covering 223 doctors, and was presented to ELEA as a working pilot.

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