Globo empowers employees and automates all areas of the business with Microsoft Power Platform

Having started with the circulation of the O Globo newspaper in 1925, Globo Organizations today support a range of companies that, in turn, bring together a vast menu of products. Among these is the largest broadcaster in Latin America and the third largest in the world: TV Globo.  

In 2019, Globo merged five companies, covering approximately 18,000 employees and a large volume of legacy systems. Seeking to increase structure, standardize the environment, and establish governance, the company realized the opportunity to transform itself with modern and intelligent technologies. Within a few months, this movement was further driven by the pandemic’s introduction shortly after the merger, forcing Globo to work remotely, both collaboratively and productively.

Standardize collaboration with a simplified solution  

Globo saw in Microsoft Teams, from Microsoft 365, a timely tool to standardize and improve collaboration and communication among employees. The company realized the potential for use when it saw a 300% jump in the number of users over a one-month period at the beginning of this process.  Adoption of SharePoint followed a similar pace. Globo moved from 300 sites on the platform to 3,000 in six months, reaching 22,000 sites on SharePoint in mid-2022. 

“At first we were worried, but we made such a big leap in one month in relation to teams in Microsoft Teams and sites in SharePoint, that it gave us peace of mind,” said Sabrina Lopes, Innovation and Productivity Leader at Globo. “Since then, Teams has become our collaboration and productivity hub.”

Driving application creation with low code solutions

The next step was to empower employees using Power Platform tools, accompanied by an enablement journey that covered approximately 2,000 people trained on the platform.   

“When we realized we already had more than 2,000 applications built, some very important to the company,” said Lopes. “We brought Microsoft’s governance program with Power Platform, which was a game changer because we were able to understand everything we had.” 

Since then, Globo has been adding knowledge, implementing and adapting technology, and bringing governance to the company. Divisions were created between the production environment, where employees develop any type of application; the approval environment, which is when it will actually go into operation; and, finally, a critical environment – this one more monitored with core applications.  

During this period, some important applications had already been developed for the company with Power Apps. One of them automated the offboarding of employees, reducing a process that took around 40 days to execute to just seven. For occupational health, an app was built with the history of the employees’ tenure within the company and the scheduling of exams. At the peak of the pandemic, requests for COVID-19 tests, psychological consultations, and any assistance or guidance with doctors and nurses were also made using apps. Just like the vaccination app – all integrated with ERP and Admin Portal.

Hackathon accelerating the technology adoption process 

“We brought intelligence, agility, and less repetitive work, empowering our employees,” said Lopes. “We have greatly reduced data input and the possibility of error, and the time gain is very large.” 

In May 2022, Globo took another step towards digital transformation when it internally organized the Power Platform Hackaton with Microsoft’s participation, involving various areas of the company such as Human Resources, Finance, Infrastructure, Legal, Entertainment, Technology, and Data Performance, among others.  

The event brought together 90 participants, distributed into 15 teams, whose goal was to develop apps that could solve company challenges.  At the end of the competition, the top three would have their applications deployed by the end of the year. One of them is focused on the management of invoices, which can reach the volume of 500 invoices per day. With Power Automate, which uses AI to read the PDF and fill in fields within the app itself, the process has gained agility and value. And what was initially to be deployed only at the affiliated broadcasters of Rede Globo in São Paulo, was expanded to the entire country.  

The other winning app has already been deployed. It operates in the acquisition of international movies for the Telecine channel and its use will soon cover national movies. Finally, the third app references items for the programming grid such as gender and age range of content. This data, crossed with an Ibope base and also using AI, aims to generate insights and data on the best time for movies to be broadcast and on the expectation of revenue. 

“We had very strong and significant growth in application development after the Hackathon, our employees were eager for this type of technology, and we are seeing very nice results,” celebrated Lopes. “A short time ago, we were the Brazilian company with more applications developed and we reduced it due to a matter of governance." 

After the Hackathon, Globo had a 30% growth in overall Power Platform consumption, Power BI dashboard creation, and Power Automate applications. Today, the organization has approximately 16,000 dashboards in Power BI, 3,600 applications in Power Apps, with approximately 5,800 streams in its environment, running up to one million streams per month.  

Another application that yielded good fruit was Set Allocation, which rented sets during the pandemic, maintaining the safety of employees, while planning entertainment productions – which is a crucial area of the company.   

“We had images of our sets, the scenic cities and all of this within a Power Apps application for the director responsible to choose the set, the scenario he wants to set up, how many people there will be, which artists would participate in that scene, costumes and makeup,” explained Lopes. “Then, a structure was set up in which everyone received the information via email, a flow in Power Automate. The artists went to the correct set, the clothes were separated, placed in the dressing room with everything necessary.” 

Microsoft Unified Support was also important for the engagement of value-added services such as training, customizations, and solution advisory, as well as an entire agile incident resolution structure, important elements for Globo's evolution journey.

Full steam development

Application development has spread across the company, from Human Resources to Data Performance, passing through the Journalism and Entertainment areas. With this volume of solutions, the company created a Power Platform Center of Excellence, and today the number of areas within the Globo Group where Microsoft low code solutions are present is large, which, according to Lopes, resulted in empowered employees. 

“Our satisfaction is through the roof,” said Lopes. “I always say that not everything we can do with the platform, but we get almost everything. It’s very rewarding to see that people are able to work smarter and smarter, and for me, that’s the biggest gain we have. We have multidisciplinary teams doing wonderful things within the company.”