Analysis Prime Guides Gerdau’s FP&A Shift From Excel to SAP Analytics Cloud

Gerdau, the largest producer of long steel in the Americas, ran its financial planning on spreadsheets held together by years of manual workarounds. Then it partnered with Analysis Prime to replace them.

Working with Analysis Prime, Gerdau moved its Excel and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)-based financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes to SAP Analytics Cloud.

Gerdau’s earlier forecasting leaned on Excel with limited automation stitched together through VBA and macros. That setup carried the company through years of steady operation, but it strained as consolidation grew more complex.

Analysis Prime helped Gerdau chart a path to SAP Analytics Cloud, the analytics layer of SAP Business Technology Platform, as a stronger foundation.

Legacy Spreadsheets Cap Out at Scale

Gerdau’s bottoms-up forecast depended on manual high-level adjustments and repeated reentries during consolidation. Each cycle required finance staff to reconcile numbers by hand across entities. The process worked, but it consumed time and left little room to catch mistakes.

The pain points Analysis Prime documented clustered around four problems: complex consolidation, hardware strain from large workbooks, frequent forecasting interruptions, and errors from repeated manual inputs. For a multi-entity manufacturer, those frictions compound with every added division.

Analysis Prime’s Blueprinting Anchors the Implementation

Analysis Prime executed the rollout remotely, running multiple sessions each day. The distributed model kept the project moving while travel stalled, and it forced the disciplined sequencing that shaped the build.

The team prioritized use cases before broad deployment. Those use cases spanned six-quarter bottoms-up forecasting, midmonth forecasts, long-term scenario planning stretching up to 10 years, and bill-of-materials (BOM) planning. Analysis Prime sequenced data-intensive forecasting first, ahead of wider platform expansion, to build momentum on the workflows that mattered most to finance.

Gerdau now runs SAP Analytics Cloud for six-quarter forecasting and BOM planning, with drill-down into full inventory data. The FP&A team gained standardized real-time collaboration and a less manual consolidation process. Planning work that once fractured across workbooks now lives in one system.

Training ran alongside the build. Analysis Prime conducted the sessions and developed the accompanying documentation, and Analysis Prime University now offers role-specific training for end users, administrators, and developers.

What This Means for SAPinsiders 

• Cloud FP&A moves into SAP-centric finance teams. Finance organizations running SAP cores increasingly move planning off spreadsheets to platforms that read actuals directly from source systems. SAP enterprises are increasingly weighting native integration with S/4HANA, ECC, BW, and HANA heavily.
• Use-case-first rollouts reshape implementation planning. Blueprinting before build-out has become common practice as teams sequence high-value forecasting scenarios ahead of broad platform deployment. Analysis Prime’s approach reflects how comparable organizations are accelerating adoption across end-users, administrators, and developers.
• Finance-led ownership redraws the FP&A operating model. Finance teams are taking direct control of planning platform configuration, calculation logic, and model changes. Implementation partners that hand day-to-day ownership to finance while preserving native connectivity to core SAP systems, shorten the cycle time between a business question and a working model.