Project Background
Gerdau's North America operations team wants to reduce repeated order-entry corrections in its SAP-based order-to-cash workflow for fabricated steel products. The issue is causing shipment delays, pricing disputes, and manual rework across sales ops, plant scheduling, and customer service. You are the Engineering Manager leading a 10-person cross-functional team to decide whether to prioritize a technical fix in Gerdau's SAP and integration stack, a process change for order intake and approvals, or a phased combination of both.
Key Stakeholders
The VP of Operations wants measurable reduction in rework within this quarter. The Commercial Director wants minimal disruption to order intake because the team is entering peak construction season. The Plant Managers want fewer last-minute schedule changes, while the SAP platform lead is concerned about introducing risky customizations before a planned quarterly release freeze.
Constraints
- Timeline: 12 weeks to show results before quarterly business review
- Budget: $220,000 remaining this quarter
- Team: 4 engineers, 1 SAP analyst, 1 QA lead, 1 product/program manager, 2 business process owners, 1 change-management lead
- Dependency: Any SAP production change must be approved by the enterprise architecture review board by Week 4
- Operational limit: Customer service can support no more than 4 hours of training per rep this quarter
Complications
- Root-cause analysis shows 55% of rework comes from inconsistent order-entry behavior, but 30% comes from missing validation rules in SAP.
- Sales leadership has already committed to a service-level improvement target, so delaying action is not acceptable.
- A separate finance initiative is changing pricing approval rules in Week 8, which may invalidate part of your solution.
Your Task
- Recommend when to push for a technical solution versus a process change, with decision criteria.
- Build a 12-week execution plan, including dependencies, milestones, and ownership.
- Define how you would pilot, measure, and scale the chosen approach.
- Identify the top risks, including stakeholder resistance and release timing.
- Specify a rollback or contingency plan if the initial approach does not improve outcomes by Week 8.
