Grupo Aço Cearense Streamlines Planning with SAP Analytics Cloud

Creating efficient planning processes and seeing results

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. 

Industry
  • Distribution
Product
Feature Highlights

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.  

 

40 Years in operation
16,000 Active Customers
5,000 Employees

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. 

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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

After the roll out, SAP Analytics Cloud for planning met all of GAC’s needs by providing a single source of truth for all budgeting and planning processes. Our solution empowered employees with an integrated data approach, allowing access to historical data as well as being easy to use for self-service analytics.  

The versioning feature in SAP Analytics Cloud for planning was integral to the company’s improved budgeting process. Different versions of the budget could now be created extremely quickly, leaving more time for strategic scenario analysis for improved resource allocation.  

Even better, GAC saw clear measurable increases in a few different business areas:  

  • 66% decrease in time required to draft a budget 
  • 60% increase in flexibility in the evaluation of new scenarios 
  • 100% integration into IT processes 
  • 40% increase in budget reliability 
  • 82% adoption 
  • 70% increase in productivity 

Overall, GAC reports improved transparency and more efficient processes throughout all lines of business in the companies. The combination of robust planning features such as versioning, in-app collaboration, and task scheduling combined with easy to use self –service data visualization and insights made a clear, significant difference to the business.  

Grupo Aço Cearense uses SAP Analytics Cloud to manage and streamline the company’s budget processes and operations. Thanks to this unique platform, we’re able to spend less time on budget processes and more time on scenario analysis, so we can improve future sales and margin results

Manuel Robalinho, SAP Analytics Cloud Consultant, Grupo Aço Cearense

Preparing for the Future

Based on the success of SAP Analytics Cloud within GAC, the company now has plans to expand to SAP S/4HANA to automate metal scrap classification. This will improve resource utilization and lead to increased production efficiency at a lower cost. GAC will continue to use SAP Analytics Cloud for planning as its company group wide single source of truth. Looking at the success so far, GAC is confident that SAP Analytics Cloud will continue to support efficient planning processes that inform confident successful decisions.  

 

Grupo Aço Cearense really understood the value of our solution and became a very close partner. The overall success of this project is a result of their commitment and engagement to make sure SAP Analytics Cloud was implemented successfully across the organization. The synergy between Aço’s team, partner and SAP were integral to its success

Viviane Savage, Customer Experience Manager, Customer Executive Engagement Team, SAP

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