To make sure Grupo Aço Cearense (GAC) is performing as efficiently as possible, it’s essential that the company has streamlined, collaborative planning processes. The Brazilian steel distributor group is made up of five companies: Aço Cearense Industrial, Aço Cearense Comercial, Siderurgica Norte Brasil S.A. -SINOBRAS, SINOBRAS Florestal, and Institulo Aço Cearense. GAC saw a clear need to collate all administrative, commercial, and industrial planning processes across all five companies into one planning solution in order to make the best decisions possible for their business. SAP Analytics Cloud’s robust planning solution made this possible.
Grupo Aço Cearense Streamlines Planning with SAP Analytics Cloud
Creating efficient planning processes and seeing results
Grupo Aço Cearense (GAC) is a leader in the Brazilian steel market. The group of five companies specializes in producing, commercializing, and distributing steel while ensuring sustainability. This focus on sustainable practices results in high process performance and differentiated services.
Defining the Data Problem
GAC’s planning process often took at least three months to create one budget version due to the many spreadsheets and other data sources that needed to be consolidated. This meant there was no single source of truth for the 130 stakeholders involved in the budgeting process.
Additionally, due to a lack of integration with external systems, GAC employees could not easily see historical data when completing budgeting and financial and operational planning. This lack of transparency made it extremely difficult to make confident decisions for the business.
Finally, GAC found that budget reports could be quite unreliable because of a lack of accountability within the budget planning process. Users could not see who had contributed to the plan or assign tasks and implement rigorous reviews in one place. This resulted in budget reports that could not be depended on.
Meeting the Challenge
The catalyst in GAC’s SAP Analytics Cloud journey was working with an SAP Customer Engagement Executive (CEE). With the CEE’s help, the company was able to implement a structure to manage the setup and roll out of SAP Analytics Cloud with the additional help of an SAP partner. This included project progress meetings, enablement sessions with experts, best practice sharing sessions, as well as technical troubleshooting.
Additionally, GAC involved top representatives from all areas of the business to ensure that the whole company was onboard and enabled to use SAP Analytics Cloud.
For example, the IT team at GAC created training materials and helped scale enablement throughout the company following a session with an SAP partner. This kind of departmental buy-in was essential to successful adoption and made easier by SAP Analytics Cloud’s intuitive interface.
The SAP team worked closely with us to help us address challenges and listened to our product feedback. We consider SAP part of our team, and we are so grateful for its support.
Manuel Robalinho, SAP Analytics Cloud Consultant, Grupo Aço Cearense