Replacing email-and-Excel procurement at a Brazilian energy firm

BM Energia is a Brazilian civil engineering company that has been building renewable energy infrastructure since 1997. They are very good at building power plants. Their procurement process, however, ran on the two most dangerous tools in corporate software: email and Excel.

The problem

Every purchase request started as an email, turned into a spreadsheet row somewhere, and then went looking for approval in somebody's inbox. Requests got lost. Approvals stalled with people on site visits. Nobody could answer simple questions like "what are we currently waiting on, and since when" without twenty minutes of archaeology. For a company coordinating suppliers across engineering projects, that hurts every single week.

What we built

An internal procurement platform that takes the whole workflow digital: requisitions created in one place, multi-level approvals that route themselves, purchase management, automated notifications when something needs a decision, supplier integration, and inventory tracking. Every action leaves an audit trail, which sounds bureaucratic until the first time someone needs to know who approved what and it takes four seconds instead of four meetings.

The stack stayed pragmatic: Vite on the front, Supabase for the backend and auth, AWS for the pieces that needed it, and CSV integration so existing spreadsheet data came along instead of being left to rot. Internal tools do not need exotic technology. They need to be fast, obvious, and impossible to lose things in.

What changed

• Email-and-spreadsheet procurement is gone, entirely.
• Every requisition is visible in real time, with its current status and owner.
• Approvals follow a defined multi-level flow instead of inbox luck.
• Suppliers and inventory live in the same system as the requests that involve them.
• There is one source of truth, with a full audit trail and reporting on top.

The quiet takeaway

This is not glamorous work, and that is precisely why it pays for itself. The most valuable software I build is rarely a shiny public site: it is the internal tool that removes a category of daily friction for the people doing real work. If your company still runs a critical process through inboxes and spreadsheets, that is not a personality trait. It is a project, and usually a shorter one than you fear.