Looking at technologies as enablers for efficiency, operational safety and cost reduction is a practice that has accompanied the sugar-energy sector for a long time. In the early industrial revolutions, the role of technology was very clear; feasibility analyses, within their complexity, were limited to exchanging physical assets for more capable assets.

The effectiveness of the work, always identified through the objective achieved, remains observed, increasing efficiency and safety and reducing the costs of the processes. Among so many paths and technological opportunities these days, this observation is less trivial; Knowing our challenges well and finding the best ways to achieve operational, tactical and strategic objectives are key points in generating results through technology and fundamental to the prosperity of the sector.

In order to obtain effective approaches by technology, it is necessary to consider the historical context and the legacy technological spectrum that brought the sector to the current levels, starting with the first industrial revolutions, with the replacement of manual labor and animal traction by the first steam turbines, followed by electrification of motors and use of electrical equipment. The results and impacts of these changes brought not only the direct gains observed during the change, but also allowed a large increase in the scale of activities in the sector.

Around the 1940s, when our first units were founded, we milled less than the equivalent of a single day's mill today. With the emergence of the Third Industrial Revolution and complete mastery of electricity, it was possible to develop highly complex automations, reproducing the best operations, known by the best operators and in real time. Once again, generating impacts never seen before by the processes, translated into stability, productivity and lower cost per grinding unit.

Today, we are experiencing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a silent revolution, almost imperceptible to the less attentive, but which takes a great leap forward, converging systems, transforming data and information into new knowledge, allowing decision-making looking to the future and no longer to the past. On the other hand, with its complexity, depth and speed with which it reaches companies, with great promises of gains, it is common to observe several initiatives, which overlap in their final objective during the search for the envisioned results.

In the historical context of São Martinho, since the installation of the first automatic processes from pneumatic, electro-pneumatic and electrical panels, it was already possible to capture value from the systems, which assumed the first repetitive and relevant tasks of industrial plants; following the first controllers, making it possible to close the first control loops of some variables to stabilize critical plant processes, generating greater stability. The success of these practices, quickly and naturally, made possible the first digital controls that, today, unfold throughout the industrial environment.

Not only control and automation practices emerged and improved, but so did process engineering and plant management systems. The first initiatives to simulate the mass and energy balances of the industrial plant, in large manual spreadsheets, allowed for the planning of the harvest and the daily breakdown to make operationalization feasible.

This practice was responsible for guiding our business until the 1990s, and, with its evolution, the direction found with each harvest became increasingly clear, also making it possible to understand the best routes and possible detours to be made. The impacts were perceived in an increasingly adherent value generation, better commercial strategies, automation demands and optimization of agro-industrial assets.

Thus, evolutions in control, automation, Information Technology and industrial processes have advanced in such a way that both process activities and technology have converged in their development and, today, are part of the same and unique roadmap. As a result, in minutes, we were able to obtain several production scenarios, based on agro-industrial data, calculated by a digital twin, which simulates processes in real time and goes far beyond good planning and also includes autonomous plant control (closed loop with real-time optimization, RTO), based on the best possible global efficiency scenario and with the plant in our hands.

This systemic vision, based on engineering and complex calculations, is only possible thanks to the computational power, reliability and security of integrated systems, with reliable databases, a robust and complete infrastructure for measurement and performance in the process. The operational evolution of the plant, which is currently digital and optimized, is part of a journey that began with the base infrastructure from the first industrial revolutions and was leveraged to a level previously unimaginable at the time of technological transition.

With all these results, the importance of the automation process of agro-industrial plants is clear, not only for the gains and results, but to enable the use of technologies and also for contributing to the transition of the technical profile of the employees, who are even more qualified to data analysis, deviations and process statistics, and not just run a plant repetitively, constantly changing set points or opening and closing valves on demand.

The road ahead is still long and sometimes uncertain; when we look back, we realize how much we have evolved and we still have to evolve with the knowledge already acquired from the existing revolutions and technologies. New technologies also make it easier, through different solutions, to solve old problems, which were not feasible in the past and did not reach the state of the technological art.

All this with a low application cost, high return potential and, often, without the need to acquire a single asset. This is the power of digital, connectivity, new intelligences and technologies that evolve every day and will lead us to tomorrow in an exponential way. Exponential and non-linear growth needs to be closely monitored. If the effectiveness of automation, intelligence and technologies available in the past were very certain and perceived with relational analyses, today's technological change is increasingly rapid, and its monitoring, evaluation, adoption on a solid basis and risk control are the key to the success.

In the old, and still current, VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous), which has already evolved into the BANI world, translated into Fragile, Anxious, Non-linear and Incomprehensible, new needs arise for companies. São Martinho structures its corporate area, with a strategic view of the units, based on a comparative global view of each unit, in which the corporate strategy is unfolded to the operational level and connected by specialists, who have an eye for trends, practices and main reference technologies, making it possible to capture them and bring them to the group, in order to guarantee the appropriate speed, supported by robust innovation and research ecosystems, through which we have managed to complete our body of entrepreneurial specialists and researchers from different universities and startups that are at our disposal to understand and solve our challenges, generating new innovations and products for the ecosystem.