The services described in this case study were performed by Hula Partners, now GP Strategies Corporation.
Situation
Gerdau is a leading producer of long steel in the Americas and one of the largest suppliers of special steel in the world. They serve a wide range of industries, including construction, energy, agricultural, and automotive. Gerdau is a legacy SAP on-premise customer with no immediate plans for moving to the cloud. However, they had a desire to enhance their user experience and improve the efficiency of their processes. They needed to eliminate paper processes and introduce automation. Longer than average approval times and a dip in data integrity drove the need for standard workflow-driven, transparent, and auditable processes. Gerdau turned to Mana, a proven GP Strategies® Process Automation Solution.
Enhancing the user experience to provide efficiency to business processes.
Challenge
Gerdau was facing challenges with their approval processes and their data integrity. Because of the service desk tickets they were using, data was inaccurate and it took too long for HR to approve and submit requests. It was also very difficult to track efficiency and service level agreements from start to finish.
Solution
The Mana application is an SAP-based workflow and forms process solution with automatic notification and rules-based workflow routing. It doesn’t require any additional IT footprint as it runs on the existing SAP WebAS/ NetWeaver Gateway. Mana delivers on the promise of self-service; you don’t have to be a SAP expert to be able to do your job. Modern experience, smart technology, low maintenance and implementation effort, and productivity changed the way the organization viewed HR.
Results
The rollout was a huge success with a 97% approval rating for satisfaction and a 92% approval rating of the new process versus the old. Gerdau also reduced their returned or rejected requests by a high of 63%. Mana has cut time for HR to submit requests down to 2 minutes. In total, 80% of Gerdau’s processes are now fully automated with the remaining 20%, including countries not yet implemented.
“While we have experienced SAP users, we still faced the challenges many companies do with process inefficiency and lack of data accuracy. Mana now provides the confidence we were looking for in our HRIS. HR considered it a ‘life changing event.’”
Emma Graham, HRIS Supervisor, Employee Shared Services, Gerdau Tampa Office
