Every hire at Brasilata starts the same way: signing a contract with an inventive role. It’s not a figure of speech or HR flourish. Since 1987, when the company created the Simplification Project, every person who walks through one of the company’s five factory doors formally carries the title of Inventor, with the concrete expectation of contributing ideas to the business, from the shop floor to management.
This commitment isn’t symbolic. Over nearly four decades, Brasilata’s employees have already registered more than two million ideas, many of them turned into solutions with international patents, such as the Plus and Biplus closures, now exported to more than 15 countries. It’s this engineering of participation that explains a company that, at 70 years of history, maintains five manufacturing units in São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Goiás and Pernambuco, and a team of more than fifteen hundred employees.
Growth, however, brings a complexity the original model, designed when the whole operation fit in a single factory in São Paulo, wasn’t built to solve. Each unit now answers to its own regulatory requirements, serves different product segments, from food cans to packaging for chemical products and aerosols, and lives with a constant pace of new hires.
It’s exactly at this point that the company’s challenge lies today: preserving, across five factories, the same consistency of training and culture that used to be guaranteed at a single address.
The strength of the Simplification Project has always been closeness. An employee would test an idea right on the line, see the result, adjust it, and the suggestion would go to leaders through direct conversations. This cycle worked for decades at a scale where it was possible to know practically everyone in the factory by name.
With five units operating different products and processes, from paint cans produced in Estrela to FSSC 22000-certified food cans manufactured in Jundiaí, that same cycle of closeness now depends on a different mechanism: formal technical training, which needs to keep pace with every new hire and every new regulatory requirement, without depending on whoever happens to be physically nearby to explain how things work there.
It’s not that teams lack interest in learning, or the will to keep alive the essence of inventing that has defined the company for almost four decades. What’s missing is a structure that works the same way in Jundiaí, in Estrela, in Dorândia, in Rio Verde and in Recife, regardless of who’s on duty that shift.
Without a common training system, the same role can be prepared in very different ways depending on the unit the person is at. A newly hired production operator in Rio Verde might learn safety routines one way, while the colleague taking on the role in Recife learns another way, with neither version documented the way audits for certifications such as ISO, TfS or Navy and Abrace approvals usually require.
The same applies to the suggestion culture that gives Brasilata its identity. If the Simplification Project depends only on in-person meetings and institutional memory, good ideas tested at one factory risk never reaching the other four, and the company’s own pace of product renewal, which recently led it into the candy segment and to develop technologies such as Hibra, ends up slower than it could be.
Main challenges identified:
These four points, taken together, reveal less a discipline problem and more the absence of a digital backbone for training.
The question guiding the journey is: how do you ensure each of Brasilata’s five units trains, certifies and connects its Inventors to the same standard, without depending on physical proximity between people?
Instead of pulling employees off the production line to train them, training starts happening within the natural flow of work, at the moment it’s needed and on the device the person already uses day to day.
In practice, this means a maintenance electrician in Jundiaí, a lithography operator in Estrela and a warehouse assistant in Recife can access exactly the path their role and unit require, without depending on generic training meant for everyone and, for that very reason, serving no one particularly well.
The same logic applies to the Simplification Project. By gaining a digital space within the learning platform itself, the exchange of ideas between Inventors stops depending on being physically at the same factory and becomes part of the environment where people already learn, test knowledge and track their progress.
Technologies and resources that can support this design
Six platform features put this proposal into practice, covering everything from organizing paths to proving compliance in external audits.
By connecting the path structure to each unit’s day-to-day, the expectation is that Brasilata’s technical training and culture of invention gain a more similar pace across the five factories, without depending on how physically close a person is to someone who already knows how to do a given task.
With a common digital foundation across the five units, Brasilata opens room to take steps that would be harder to coordinate manually today, bringing technical training even closer to the pace of innovation that’s already part of the company’s identity.
In the end, what Brasilata is building with Happmobi doesn’t replace what has always driven the company: turning the same gear, idea after idea, among people who agreed, the day they signed their contract, to carry the title of Inventor. Technology just ensures that gear turns with the same strength in Jundiaí, in Estrela, in Dorândia, in Rio Verde and in Recife, at the same time. After all, a company that already counts more than two million registered ideas knows that what sustains innovation isn’t the size of the structure, but the certainty that every person, at any unit, still has room to invent.
+ 1500
Metal packaging manufacturing (steel)
From the learner experience to manager governance: Happmobi’s features were designed to simplify L&D operations and accelerate learning results.
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Hello! Great to have you here!
Tell me: What’s your corporate email
and what kind of digital corporate education solution are you looking for?