Gerdau Ameristeel
This area of the facility is where steel is taken to cool off before it is transported to the storage yard.
Improving Operational Efficiency & Increasing Product Awareness
Working with Gerdau gave me the opportunity to continue my passion for solving problems in the B2B enterprise UX space. Long before the project even started, the company had developed a reputation for getting product out of the door and to the construction site in less than a timely manner. For the customer service representatives, this was such a huge pain point because they had no visibility into the product life cycle. In addition, the scheduling and operations departments were always at war with each other trying to establish which pile of steel to cut next. Meanwhile, the logistics department is constantly on a mission trying to find a pile of steel that was cut weeks ago. In essence, a steel manufacturing facility faces many challenges simultaneously. The fact that both of their computer systems were unable to communicate with each other added another layer of complexity to the equation.
This image was taken onsite in the control room of steel manufacturing plant during my research observations.
Legacy Application Innovation
As the solo UX resource allocated for this effort, I owned all of the phases of the design process and was given the freedom to conduct qualitative interviews with the customer service team remotely. When time permitted, I was also allowed to perform onsite observational studies from the scheduling, logistics, and operational perspectives. These insights played a major role in terms of shaping the UX strategy while still being mindful of the architectural constraints. SAP and QMOS are the legacy computer systems utilized by the plant. Having said that, they do not integrate and this is the root cause of many of the business problems. Despite this, the challenge was to ask the users what information was important to them and design a