Case Study – Accelerating Growth and Building Capacity at Sistema.bio

Background

Sistema.bio is a global social enterprise focused on transforming waste into fertilizer for farmers and reducing carbon emissions by manufacturing and selling prefabricated biodigester solutions with biogas appliances. Sistema.bio works directly or with partners in Latin America, Africa and India and tracks sales and services, including their use of technology, financing and training in Salesforce along with the Taroworks field service application.

All of the data from farmers to biodigesters and the services they receive are an essential part of Sistema.bio’s business including calculating carbon emission reductions and tracking impact over time. When they approached Shujaa Consulting for support in 2022, they had already been using Salesforce for over a decade. At this time they were planning on expanding their sales into new and existing markets. The ambitious 2023 goal was to sell and install the same amount of biodigesters in one year that they had sold in the past decade. And they did it!

Problem | Scaling Up to Meet a Growth Opportunity

Even though Sistema.bio had collected and stored data effectively in Salesforce for many years; to grow they needed to change their business processes to include selling biodigesters to partners as well as directly to farmers. This change needed to be reflected in their processes and tools, namely; Salesforce. However, the team was reaching technical and operational limits and the data model could not accommodate the growth of these new lines of business. At the same time, as they were growing, Sistema.bio was facing some internal staffing challenges and were under-resourced to make the changes needed to Salesforce and needed support in maturing the internal Data Infrastructure team to support the growth until they were able to hire a Salesforce product manager.

Solution | Supporting Capacity Building

Shujaa Consulting started working with Sistema.bio to re-architect their data model in 2022. Esther Altorfer, who was the East Africa Managing Director, transitioned into the role of Chief Strategy Officer and the Data Infrastructure team that owned Salesforce began to report to her. It was during this time that Esther realized that the team was under-resourced and needed help. Shujaa was already working on the technical transformation to support the growth of Sistema.bio and was able to expand the scope of work to provide technology leadership to the Salesforce team under Esther’s guidance. “Sarah was able to come into Sistema.bio and really help us understand what we needed to focus on,” said Esther ​A​ltorfer, Chief Strategy Officer at Sistema.bio. “As a result, we were able to make better decisions.”

The Shujaa team was tasked with the re-architecture project as well as bringing needed transparency to the Data infrastructure team and work being done in Salesforce. Using Shujaa’s methodology, Sarah led Sistema.bio to focus on three key areas: People, Process and Product. In collaboration with Esther, she helped define the needed size and skills for the team, helped hire a Salesforce Product Manager, establish processes of ticket tracking for bugs and enhancements, and provided regular check-ins with the leadership team on the roadmap of work. 

“We always work as partners to solve the problems — from technical needs to strategy to staffing — our work processes always include collaboration.” – Sarah Miller, CEO & Co-Founder

Through high levels of communication and regular check-ins Shujaa was able to adapt  to the needs of Sistema.bio as the scope evolved overtime. This included creating a very clear budget, agreeing on short term and long term goals, and developing a handover strategy for when Sistema.bio’s team had been hired. 

“Shujaa’s team was clearly committed to really going deep and fully understanding the problems. They didn’t shy away when things were complicated but saw this as an opportunity to go deeper,” said Esther.

In some cases throughout the project work, the processes were not clear enough to be digitized. Shujaa was able to work with the team to identify the right stakeholders and ask questions to help further clarify the business process before proceeding with more technical solutions. Shujaa’s team in Colombia and Kenya was able to connect Sistma.bio’s business users and the technical team globally to try to understand the process and “…really leverage these teams, capacities and languages. This was very unique to Shujaa and very important to us,” said Esther.

Outcome

After a year of working with Shujaa, Sistema.bio was able to hire an experienced Salesforce Product Manager and expand their team internally. They have clear processes and transparency for bug and enhancement tracking and have completed several critical projects to help achieve their sales goals with and without Shujaa’s support. In 2023, they achieved their ambitious goal of selling as many biodigesters globally in 1 year as they have sold in the past decade. Today Shujaa works with Sistema.bio on a coaching basis as the team’s needs evolve. 

“It was because of Shujaa that we were really able to accelerate the development of our products and our work in several countries,” said Esther.