We are facing a particularly interesting topic, especially for the sugar-energy segment, which attracted me a lot while I was more actively operating in the sector. Let's better understand the meaning of management to better contextualize the importance of the subject.

Handling: is the act of handling, of making use of something with the hands, action of directing, governing, leading, conducting, controlling or managing business or goods, administration. I would, however, like to suggest a peculiar and adequate definition for the development of the subject: Management in the bioenergetic system can be defined as the way of choosing how to extract better results, taking into account the limitations, opportunities and characteristics of its unit, technology and resources available to the manager.

Therefore, we can understand that management is a management tool, somewhat ethereal, without defined form or standard, unavailable on program shelves. Another understanding would be that management is an inherent characteristic of the intellectual and cognitive behavior of the manager who makes decisions and choices based on conditions that are presented to him at that moment, according to certain characteristics, aided or not, by available technologies and resources.

Before going into the specifics of our follow-up and recalling past experiences, I can give examples of countless management programs, Integrated Management System, that I came across and helped to develop and install. All had numerous modeling resources, results history and even artificial intelligence; however, none with the ability to interpret the biosystem as a whole and decide which would be the best path, nor the route with the best result.

Evidently, the amount of data examined and the speed of information generated are of great use, but I cannot see management as an available product in which all the prerequisites for your business are placed and it offers you the way to do it. in the most efficient and profitable way.

Let's look more specifically at our follow-up, and I'm sorry readers if I become repetitive, but I think it's important to understand and differentiate the sugar-energy sector from other sectors of the agroindustry in order to understand where it fits in and what is the importance of management.

It may seem very conceptual, but despite all the industrial and mechanized technology applied, our sector is dependent on a plant, the saccharum officinarum, with an annual cycle, semi-perennial , cultivated in open soil and which necessarily needs to be alive, even hours before being processed.

Therefore, a living plant with an annual cycle, as a vegetable, must be planted, cultivated and cared for throughout its useful life cycle, exposed to weather conditions over a period of 12 to 18 months, harvested and processed in a few hours, generally in volumes of thousands of tons per hour, without the possibility of forming regulatory stocks, or buffers throughout the production chain.

Furthermore, harvesting is not only intended to deliver the best possible raw material to the industry, which chooses the fields with the best maturation rates. Also, it must attend to the logistics of distance and the maintenance of medium radii, freeing up areas for replanting, when there are no intercropped cereals, freeing up an area for fertilization and cultivation, an area for applying vinasse, an area for suppliers. And, if there is a need, he must collect the chaff in the midst of these operations.

I think there will be a better understanding if we examine other cultures that, despite the risks inherent in each one (windows for operations and possibility of losses) have some different characteristics:

Cellulose chain: the plant is perennial with continuous growth. When harvested, it can be stored. Processing takes place all year round, there is no waiting time for cultural treatments which, if they occur at all, are extremely simple.
Cereal chain: when harvested, they can be stocked and stored before processing, as well as sold before harvesting, as they are commodities.

Even the ox which, despite the risks and losses, but which, ultimately, can be kept on pasture. Personally, I cannot identify any agribusiness chain that moves similar volumes, at the right time with so many interferences or ties, or interferences and interdependencies between processes, as they say in management programs.

So how do you manage all of this efficiently and effectively, maximizing results in normally aggressive business environments? I can't remember in my school bench days any subject that taught how to handle. They taught us how to produce under the best conditions, or within the Normal Condition of Temperature and Pressure, but I don't remember learning to live with the most varied conditions, using production and management technologies combined with socio-environmental, edaphoclimatic, industrial factors and business and on time. All of this really is, to say the least, challenging.

I believe that, now, I have brought the most appropriate management concept to the production system of the sugar-energy sector. Unlike the colloquial definition of “doing it with your own hands”, we can understand that management is using all possible knowledge and available technology to define what, how, where and when to carry out the processes and means of production, aiming to maximize results.

Which, due to the particularities and ties of the sugar-energy production system, mentioned above, makes the management of processes even more challenging. Due to the size of the current units and the extent of cultivated land, it is practically impossible for a production unit to operate in a single soil type or pattern. Often, even microclimate changes can occur within the same unit. Selecting the most suitable varieties with the greatest production potential in a variegated environment is already the first management exercise to be applied.

From then on, lead these fields, selecting, choosing among the most diverse forms of cultivation, fertilization and available technologies, until it comes time to harvest. When other variables and ties come into play, and, once again, professionals, equipped with information and adequate tools, will be constantly instigated to manage their processes. They will have to make decisions, evaluating scenarios, projecting results based on the most diverse ways of doing things.

An unwary reader might think: “ Okay, it sounds complicated, but it's repetitive; next year, just do everything the same as what worked this year. ” How nice it would be if next year all climatic, socioeconomic and commercial conditions were the same too; if the plant were not alive, if its physiological behavior were not changeable.

If that were the case, a practical production management manual would be edited, a chair would be created in the curriculum of universities and that was it; we would train professional handlers. The interesting thing about management is exactly this: rarely will we have the same production conditions, and, not always, the practices used in the productive processes may be adequate for a vegetative cycle as they were in another.

How to resolve the issue and how to train professionals for this complicated management exercise? In my view, the equation begins with an adequate management of the knowledge acquired in research at institutes of technology and universities, in tireless observation in the field, in “prose with the plant”, in the practice of experimental attempts, in the tireless observation of cause and effect and, mainly, in the diffusion and exchange of this acquired knowledge, which simply accumulated and retained, will not result in any result of perennial success.

Above all, faced with the possibility of applying the resources of digital information technology available today, working on this accumulated knowledge in relational databases, applying artificial intelligence to them so that, in this immense universe of data, we can relate the information and, thus, acquire security to define what, how, where and when. Only in this way will we fully manage the production processes in a more assertive way, without dispensing with the cognitive ability inherent in a good manager.