Gerdau North America Account Dossier

What Connection Actually Sells Into Manufacturers

Connection runs a dedicated Manufacturing Technology practice with its own named strategy lead, not a generic enterprise catalog stretched to fit a plant floor. Eight lines matter for an account the size of Gerdau North America: eight mini-mills, a capital cycle actively adding capacity, and an OT layer that has historically run separate from IT.

Connection's closest thing to a flagship product for this vertical is Manufacturing in a Box, delivered through its Technology Integration & Distribution Center (TIDC) — pre-provisioned, tested kits shipped ready to plug in at a plant site. The identity underneath it: Connection sells and supports the infrastructure, network, security, and lifecycle layer a mill's control systems and enterprise systems both run on top of — not the melt-shop equipment itself. Worth holding onto: Connection is a plant-floor-to-cloud infrastructure partner, not an automation-equipment vendor competing with SMS group or Danieli.

Plant DeploymentManufacturing in a Box & Zero-Touch Rollout

Manufacturing in a Box, via the Technology Integration & Distribution Center — pre-provisioned, tested kits shipped ready to deploy, cited at a 35% reduction in labor versus site-by-site builds.
Unbox and Go and Zero-Touch Provisioning extend the same model to edge devices — smart sensors, industrial PCs, gateways, ruggedized endpoints.
The practice is explicitly built around aerospace, automotive, high-value electronics, pharma/medical device, and food & beverage — with industrial standards supported: IP66/68/69K, HAZLOC, Intrinsically Safe, NEMA, FDA, CGMP.

OT/IT ConvergenceIndustrial Cybersecurity

Named Manufacturing OT Services line: Industrial Assessments, IT/OT Convergence design and deployment, Industrial Cybersecurity (segmentation, DMZs, centralized monitoring), and Plant Floor Automation — explicitly PLC/PAC integration and SCADA/HMI deployment.
Manufacturing is publicly cited by Connection as the #1 most-targeted sector for cyberattacks; only 35% of manufacturers have achieved real IT/OT integration despite 81% calling it critical.
Managed detection layered on top via Cisco XDR and Connection's own managed-security arm, Port53.

Data CenterModern Infrastructure & Edge

Nutanix and VMware hyperconverged infrastructure, Business Resiliency Services, and Backup/DRaaS.
Colocation and edge capacity through partner Expedient — including a distinct Expedient Edge offering positioned specifically for the manufacturing practice, the one plant-floor-adjacent data-center signal in Connection's public content.
11:11 Systems as a secondary managed backup/DR partner.

PowerUPS & Facility Resilience

APC (Schneider Electric) — Smart-UPS SRT double-conversion, Li-Ion, rack PDUs, Easy UPS 3S three-phase parallel bypass gear.
Eaton / Tripp Lite, including Intelligent Power Manager for fleet-wide remote UPS monitoring across distributed sites.
Honest gap: Connection's public power content is written for IT-equipment resilience (storm-season UPS prep), not mill-scale or substation power — worth scoping precisely rather than overselling.

MobilityRugged Devices for the Plant Floor

Zebra — Premier National Solutions Provider with a manufacturing/tracking specialization; rugged tablets (ET80) and mobile computers (TC21/TC26).
Panasonic Toughbook — Diamond Partner tier, deep catalog (56/40/33 series) plus multi-year protection plans.
OtterBox and UAG rugged cases, plus Cisco/Aruba Wi-Fi 6E for plant-floor coverage — including the Cisco IW9165 outdoor/long-range mesh radio built for industrial backhaul.

Vision & SafetyAI Cameras & Physical Security

Axis and Verkada camera catalogs plus Verkada access control — the same lines Connection runs across its other verticals.
Manufacturing-specific angle: Meraki MV, Plainsight, and Chooch Vision AI — named partners for computer-vision safety monitoring on the plant floor.
No Connection-authored content ties this camera stack specifically to large industrial-campus perimeter security yet — white space Lorie can be first to frame.

AI & DataCNXN Helix

CNXN Helix, Connection's Center for Applied AI and Robotics, runs a five-stage methodology — Discover, Assess, Design, Deploy, Scale — with named offers: AI-in-a-Box with Jumpstart Services, AI Readiness Workshops, Agentic AI.
Confirmed NVIDIA Solution Provider relationship.
Manufacturing-specific AI content published directly: predictive maintenance cited at 5–10% lower maintenance cost (Deloitte), and factory sensor/quality/maintenance data framed explicitly as an AI asset class.

SustainabilityCircular IT / ITAD

Connection's 2025 Sustainability Report ("Operate Better. Enable Better.") documents real circularity numbers: 256 tons of material recycled, 36,000 IT asset-disposition units processed, and roughly 78,000 depot-refurbished units returned to inventory rather than scrapped.
EcoVadis Bronze Medal (2025, top 35% globally); CDP Climate score improved C → B-.
ITAD is a named, live service line — but Connection has never packaged it as a circularity story for an industrial client. That's an opening, not a pitch someone's already heard.

What Gerdau Is Actually Building Right Now

North America now generates roughly three-quarters of Gerdau's consolidated global EBITDA — the region isn't a satellite operation off Porto Alegre's books anymore, it's the company's profit engine. A raised R$9.2 billion 2024–2027 investment cycle and a conservative 0.69x leverage ratio both point the same direction: there's real, funded appetite for infrastructure spend right now, not a five-year hope.

Capital CycleNorth America Now Drives the Company

Q2 2026: North America generated ~74% of consolidated EBITDA and 55% of net sales; NA FY2025 EBITDA reached R$6.5B (+18.5% YoY), with an order backlog over 100 days as of mid-2026.
Consolidated net debt/EBITDA leverage sits at a conservative 0.69x (Q2 2026) — a balance sheet with real room to fund technology investment alongside plant capex.
The 2024–2027 investment cycle was raised to R$9.2 billion, prioritizing North America downstream expansion and targeting ~R$2.8B in incremental annual EBITDA by 2027.

Live Expansion → 2026 StartupMidlothian, Texas

Full deep-dive on tab 03. Headline: a R$1.2B phase-1 upgrade adding 150,000 mt/yr of new EAF capacity, targeted for an H2 2026 startup — 74% physically complete, 88% financially committed as of Q4 2025.
Gerdau's largest North American mill, and the single most dated, concrete infrastructure trigger in this dossier.

Trade PolicySection 232 Tailwind, USMCA Overhang

Current 50% Section 232 duties on imported steel have shrunk import volumes (~3.1M mt/yr average 2022–24 → ~2.8M mt in 2025), directly supporting North American margin expansion and order backlogs over 100 days.
Management has flagged the pending USMCA renegotiation as "pivotal" — a real near-term uncertainty shaping how aggressively Gerdau NA commits to further capacity and infrastructure spend.

DecarbonizationGreen Steel, Real Numbers

Gerdau NewEco — a third-party-audited low-carbon steel line at 0.85 t CO₂e/t steel, roughly half the global industry average; CEO Gustavo Werneck ties it directly to customer decarbonization requirements.
2031 target: cut Scope 1+2 intensity to 0.82 t CO₂e/t steel; carbon-neutrality ambition by 2050.
Self-generated energy topped 50% of total consumption by Q2 2026 — fed by the Barro Alto Solar Complex, the TotalEnergies/174 Power Global 80MW Texas project, and an expanded Newave Energia stake.
First-time worldsteel "Steel Sustainability Champion" recognition, announced April 2026.

AI & DataAzure, Copilot, and a Live Case Study

Microsoft published a detailed customer case study: Gerdau used Azure Form Recognizer, Azure OpenAI (GPT), and Azure Cognitive Services to automate special-steel quotation analysis — accuracy rose 73% → 95%, turnaround fell from 29 to 10 days, and adoption grew from 13 to 100+ customers.
Named contributors: Rodrigo Silveira, Chief Data and AI Officer, and Luís Felipe Barrera Salamanca, Data Scientist Lead — a live, named AI program, not a vague ambition.
Copilot pilots underway for document creation and decision support; a dedicated AI Innovation Center (2024) and an internal "AI Summit 2026" show this scaling, not staying a one-off pilot.

ERPAn S/4HANA Migration Without Its Architect

Gerdau Long Steel North America's SAP S/4HANA migration was the confirmed capstone project of former NA Digital & IT Director Claudio Fuhrmann Schneider — who departed for Refresco in 2025 after five years in the role.
No successor has been publicly confirmed; a "Digital IT Leader" requisition for Tampa surfaced on LinkedIn afterward and has since rotated off the board. Exact rollout completion status is unconfirmed.

SafetyA Record Worth Protecting

Gerdau states its lowest-ever workplace accident frequency rate came in 2024, with CEO Werneck repeating the "record-low" framing through 2025 — company messaging ties it to 124 years of operating history.
No specific 2025 numeric rate was locatable in public sources (flagged, not fabricated) — but the qualitative signal is consistent and repeated by the CEO himself, meaning safety is a subject leadership is actively proud of and receptive to reinforcing.

Case File — The IT Leadership Vacuum

Gerdau Long Steel North America's top digital/IT seat has been effectively open since Claudio Fuhrmann Schneider's 2025 departure for Refresco — he'd spent five years in the role and was mid-way through the company's SAP S/4HANA migration when he left. A "Digital IT Leader" requisition for Tampa surfaced on LinkedIn afterward, but its posting has since rotated off the board, and no successor has surfaced anywhere public. That's either been quietly filled or is still open — and either way, it's the single fact to verify before naming anyone as "the" contact in a live meeting. In the meantime, the seat's usual budget conversations plausibly route through Finance (VP Vinicius Crescencio) and CEO Chia Yuan Wang — and whoever eventually fills it inherits every vendor relationship already in the room. That makes right now, not after a new hire settles in, the moment to be building trust directly with Wang and Crescencio.

Midlothian, Texas — The Deep Dive

Gerdau's largest North American mill, and the single most concrete, dated infrastructure trigger in this dossier: a real construction project with a real capacity number and a real 2026 startup window, not a five-year strategic ambition.

InvestmentThe Numbers

Phase-1 upgrade: R$1.2 billion (~US$226M), adding 150,000 mt/yr of EAF melt-shop capacity.
As of Q4 2025: 74% physical progress, 88% financial progress — most of the capital is already committed, but the physical build, and its IT/OT/network/security buildout, is still actively underway.
Startup targeted for H2 2026 — live or imminent as this dossier is being read. Projected incremental EBITDA ~R$275M/year once ramped.

DownstreamBeyond the Melt Shop

A 90,000-mt downstream solar-pile facility, commissioned Q3 2025 — supplying steel piling for solar farm construction, a fast-growing end market.
A new heat-treatment facility for wind-energy products — another renewable-adjacent product line with its own process-control and quality-tracking needs.
Every new downstream line is a new set of PLCs, quality-tracking systems, and often a new physical footprint needing its own network drop and camera coverage.

PowerAn 80MW Solar Partnership, On-Site

174 Power Global, Gerdau Long Steel North America, and TotalEnergies broke ground on an 80MW solar PV facility specifically to power Gerdau's Texas operations.
A mill investing directly in its own generation is a mill thinking hard about power resilience and cost — a natural entry point for a UPS/power-monitoring conversation scoped honestly to the IT/control layer, not the furnace itself.

TimingWhy Now, Specifically

With physical progress already at 74% and startup targeted for H2 2026, any infrastructure, network, security, or device-fleet conversation tied to Midlothian has a real, narrow window — not an evergreen "someday" pitch.
A greenfield capacity addition is also the cleanest point to introduce standardized, pre-provisioned deployment before ad hoc, site-specific IT decisions get made under commissioning-deadline pressure.

Case File — No Existing Connection Footprint, Confirmed

A direct search for any public link between Connection and Gerdau — case study, press release, testimonial — returned nothing. The only "Gerdau + Connection" hits online are Gerdau's own unrelated "Driver Connection" logistics app, built by an outside agency (Haneke Design), not Connection/CNXN. That's a coincidental name collision, not a warm lead — but it also confirms there's no incumbent Connection relationship at Midlothian to protect or compete against internally. Whatever gets built here starts clean.

Gerdau Next & the AI Innovation Center — And Where Connection Actually Fits

"Innovation" at Gerdau is also really two organizations that sound like one, and getting the door wrong wastes the meeting: Gerdau Next Ventures buys small equity stakes in startups; it doesn't buy managed services or infrastructure from a reseller. The AI Innovation Center and the Chief Data and AI Officer's team are where the real infrastructure and tooling budget lives.

Correction — Gerdau Next Ventures Isn't an Infrastructure Door

Gerdau Next Ventures is the company's corporate-venture/acceleration arm: an equity-free acceleration model that has backed 12 startups to date (seed-to-growth stage) across proptech, logtech, prefab construction, document management, Industry 4.0, AI/ML, and sustainability (solar, wind, green hydrogen, carbon capture). It has run multiple themed acceleration batches, including one with Randon Ventures and one affiliated with IBRAM, Brazil's mining-industry association. This is a startup-acceleration and cap-table door, not a procurement door — pitching Connection's managed-services catalog into Gerdau Next Ventures is a category mismatch, the same trap TGH Ventures set on the healthcare side of Connection's business.

Innovation / VentureGerdau Next Ventures — The Equity Side

12 investments to date; equity-free acceleration model; themed batches with outside partners.
Portfolio focus: proptech, logtech, prefab construction, document management, Industry 4.0, AI/ML, sustainability.
What this org buys: startup equity/acceleration slots, not managed IT services.

Infrastructure / BudgetAI Innovation Center — The Vendor Side

Launched 2024 to scale AI experimentation company-wide; runs the "Gerdau Intelligence" platform, cited as already halving cost and delivery time for new AI solutions.
Held an internal "AI Summit 2026" with cross-geography AI teams and an "AI Champions/Builders" recognition program — a live, resourced, growing internal function.
Rodrigo Silveira, Chief Data and AI Officer, is the named executive owner — the same person credited in Microsoft's Azure case study — making him the clearest single bridge between "innovation" messaging and real infrastructure spend.

Digital TwinUbiratã — A JV Built to Expand Beyond Brazil

Ubiratã: a 50/50 joint venture between Gerdau Next and SpaceTime Labs (project originated 2021, launched publicly January 2023) building Digital Twin, Horizontal Optimization, and Early Warning System platforms combining AI, autonomous systems, and robotics for industrial operations.
First piloted at Ouro Branco, Gerdau's largest plant (Minas Gerais, Brazil) — with stated plans to expand to other Gerdau units across the Americas, and eventually to adjacent industries.
North America is a plausible next stop for exactly the kind of edge-compute, sensor, and network infrastructure Connection already sells — worth asking directly whether NA is on that expansion roadmap.

Predictive MaintenanceAlready Working With GE Digital

Gerdau piloted predictive analytics with GE Digital's Industrial Performance & Reliability Center — monitoring 50 assets, catching two pre-failure issues with savings equal to the pilot's own cost, documented as a GE customer case study.
That's real proof Gerdau already believes in the predictive-maintenance business case — the open question is infrastructure capacity and integration support as it scales past a 50-asset pilot into full plant coverage.

Gerdau Next Ventures' portfolio, batch partners, and the Ubiratã JV details come from Gerdau's own newsroom and startup-ecosystem press coverage (IBRAM, Startupi), not guessed. Whether Ubiratã's North America expansion has an actual timeline — or whether it's under discussion at all — was not found in any public source and should be confirmed directly with Rodrigo Silveira's team before referencing a date in a live conversation.

Who's in the Room

No single confirmed contact exists at Gerdau North America the way TGH had a named CISO — the top NA digital/IT seat is in transition. Treat Wang and Crescencio as the real, confirmed people to build trust with now; treat whoever eventually holds the Digital IT Leader title as the person these twelve conversations are ultimately built for.

Gerdau Global Leadership

Name	Role	What they optimize for	LinkedIn
Gustavo Werneck	President & CEO (since 2018)	Sets the North-America-first capital allocation strategy; publicly ties Gerdau's decarbonization story (NewEco) directly to customer demand.	/in/gustavowerneck
Rafael Japur	EVP, CFO & IR Director	Owns the R$9.2B 2024–2027 investment cycle and the leverage discipline (0.69x net debt/EBITDA) that funds it.	/in/rafael-japur
Gustavo Franca	Global Chief Information Officer	Named a 2026 Top 50 Technology & Innovation Executive (Forbes Brasil); owns the corporate AI-governance platform underpinning digital initiatives company-wide.	/in/gustavo-sfranca
Denis Eduardo Paim	Global Chief Technology Officer	Owns the technology architecture standard Gerdau North America's own S/4HANA and AI programs answer to.	/in/denis-eduardo-paim
Rodrigo Silveira	Chief Data and AI Officer	The named executive behind the Azure quotation-automation case study and the AI Innovation Center's roadmap — the clearest bridge from "innovation" to real budget.	/in/rsilveira8
Vitor Sena	Global CISO & Data Protection Officer	Publicly championed the 2022 Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery rollout against ransomware — owns Gerdau's global security posture standard.	/in/vitorsena

Gerdau North America Leadership — The Buying Org

Name	Role	What they optimize for	LinkedIn
Chia Yuan Wang	CEO & President, Gerdau North America (Long Steel) (in role since Apr 2018)	The senior-most confirmed NA decision-maker; owns the P&L behind Midlothian and the whole NA capital cycle.	/in/chia-yuan-wang
Marcos Zilles Mattiello	President, Gerdau Special Steel North America (took the seat in 2026)	Arrived from leading Gerdau Siderperu — a fresh relationship with no incumbent vendor history to unseat.	/in/marcos-zilles-mattiello
Vinicius Crescencio	Vice President, Finance, Gerdau North America	Plausibly the practical point of contact for any technology spend while the Digital IT Leader seat is unresolved — the RACE plan's real Reach target.	/in/vinicius-crescencio
Richard Ballard	Director of Procurement, US/Canada	Owns vendor onboarding and contracting mechanics for anything Connection eventually sells in.	/in/richard-e-ballard
Alexandre Bonato	Manager, Procurement Operations	Supply-chain/procurement background from Vale; operational counterpart to Ballard.	/in/alexandre-bonato
Claudio F. Schneider	Former Digital & IT Director / CIO, Gerdau Long Steel NA (2020–2025; now VP IT, Refresco)	Architected the S/4HANA migration before departing in 2025 — the seat he vacated is this dossier's single most important open question.	/in/cfschneider
— Open Seat —	Digital IT Leader, Gerdau North America (status unconfirmed)	An open LinkedIn requisition for this Tampa-based role surfaced after Schneider's departure and has since rotated off the board. Confirm current status — filled, interim, or still open — before naming anyone as "the" contact in a live meeting.	—

Gaps, stated plainly: no current named individual could be confirmed for VP Operations/Manufacturing, VP Human Resources, or VP Sustainability/ESG at Gerdau North America despite targeted searching — treat these as open research items, not omissions. Employee headcount is cited in this dossier as "30,000+" per Gerdau's own company messaging; third-party trackers show a range as low as ~25,500, unreconciled without the FY2025 20-F, which returned an access error on every fetch attempt. A RocketReach org-chart scrape surfaced a "Rapeal Bruce" as Gerdau North America's CEO — this contradicts the well-corroborated Chia Yuan Wang and has been excluded as a garbled aggregator entry, not a real name.

Connection: Who's on Our Side

Starting with the rep running the account, then who she'd loop in, and when.

The RepLorie Tomlinson — Twenty Years In

Lorie's path runs through three stops before Connection: Tech Data, where she started in channel sales; Insight, in business development; and six years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise — first as a Business Partner & Manager, then Enterprise Account Manager — before joining Connection on January 1, 2026 as an Enterprise Account Manager, a title her own LinkedIn confirms.

That HPE stretch runs directly into this account: six years across storage, server, and disaster-recovery lines, plus Aruba, HPE's networking division — network access control, wireless/wired backbone, and device segmentation. Those are exactly the categories underneath Topics 09, 10, and 11 below, and Gerdau North America is Lorie's second major account build at Connection after Tampa General Hospital, not her first swing at unfamiliar territory.

Manufacturing specifically is new ground for her at Connection — her own announcement post thanks Mickey Bland, Mariano Dy-Liacco X, and Grisell Martinez by name, consistent with sitting inside the Enterprise Solutions Group under Bland, but doesn't mention Gerdau or manufacturing. That means this dossier, not prior account history, is the starting point.

Name	Role	Background	LinkedIn
Tim McGrath	President & CEO, Connection	Leading Connection since 2016 (rebrand to Nasdaq: CNXN); the $2.89B company was named to TIME's "America's Best Mid-Size Companies" 2026 list and Newsweek's most-trustworthy-companies ranking.	ir.connection.com bio
Mickey Bland	President, Enterprise Solutions Group	Joined Nov. 2022 after ~24 years at Insight Enterprises; reports directly to McGrath — the executive sponsor above the manufacturing practice.	/in/mickey-bland
Ryan Spurr	Director, Manufacturing Strategy & Helix AI Advisory Director	25 years in manufacturing/IT/portfolio leadership, prior BAE Systems; the practice's lead strategist — the direct parallel to Jennifer Johnson in healthcare.	/in/ryan-spurr
Steven Crowthers	VP, Technology Integration & Distribution Center	Co-authored the "Manufacturing in a Box" delivery model with Spurr — owns the physical fulfillment/zero-touch pipeline that would actually ship kits to Midlothian.	Connected blog byline
Greg Geeve	Enterprise Account Executive	Third co-author on the same TIDC piece — a manufacturing-account seller peer Lorie can compare notes with.	Connected blog byline

Bland, Spurr, McGrath, and the TIDC co-authors are sourced from Connection's own newsroom, investor-relations bio pages, and the "Connected" community blog — not guessed. Lorie's Tech Data / Insight / HPE career history carries forward from her TGH account dossier; her Connection start date and Enterprise Account Manager title are independently confirmed via her own LinkedIn profile and announcement post. No public LinkedIn URL could be independently confirmed for McGrath, Crowthers, or Geeve — their bio sources are linked instead of a personal profile. Confirm titles are still current before looping anyone in.

The RACE Plan — Reach, Act, Convert, Engage

The operational sequence from a cold, clean-slate account to a standing infrastructure partner — keyed to what's actually true about Gerdau North America right now: a dated, narrow Midlothian startup window, a genuinely open IT-leadership seat, and zero prior Connection footprint to either leverage or work around.

Unlike TGH, there's no prior relationship to build on here — this dossier is the starting line, not a step already behind us. The first physical action is opening with Crescencio or Wang directly.

01 · ReachGet a Credible Reason in the Room

Objective: Open with Wang or Crescencio on real, dated news — not a cold product pitch.
Do this: Lead with the Midlothian H2 2026 startup window and Gerdau's own worldsteel Sustainability Champion recognition — both are things Gerdau's leadership is already proud of and talking about publicly, not something Lorie has to introduce.
Trigger: The Digital IT Leader vacancy — genuinely time-sensitive, since whoever fills it inherits whatever vendor relationships already exist.
Avoid: Gerdau Next Ventures as a first door. Confirmed equity-only, not a services buyer (see Gerdau Next).

02 · ActTurn the Open Into a Booked Call

Objective: A low-friction, no-PO first ask already in hand.
Do this: Offer a scoped OT/IT convergence and industrial-cybersecurity assessment framed around Midlothian's live commissioning window — a bounded, dated ask, not an open-ended audit.
Watch: S/4HANA continuity and any AI/digital-twin conversation stall without a named owner — confirm who inherited Schneider's mandate before proposing anything ERP-adjacent.
Success metric: Call booked with Wang, Crescencio, or Ballard; assessment scope accepted.

03 · ConvertTurn the Meeting Into a Signed Deal

Objective: One committed next step out of the meeting, not twelve open threads.
Do this: Bundle the OT/IT convergence assessment with a right-sized Midlothian rollout kit (Manufacturing in a Box) as the first proposal, since they solve the same commissioning-window problem together. Leave ITAD/circularity, vision-AI safety, and power resilience as one-pagers for the next budget cycle.
Watch: Nothing here has an incumbent to displace — confirmed no prior Connection footprint. The real risk is a competitor closing the relationship first, not Connection replacing someone.
Success metric: Signed SOW on the bundled Midlothian scope.

04 · EngageBecome the Embedded Partner, Not a Vendor

Objective: Win the second and third engagement — across at least one more NA mill — before a competitor gets a first look.
Do this: Ride the S/4HANA continuity conversation once ownership is confirmed; raise the ITAD/circularity story directly with Rodrigo Silveira's AI Innovation Center team, since it's a genuinely novel pitch Gerdau hasn't heard from anyone else; ask directly whether Ubiratã's expansion "to other Gerdau units across the Americas" includes North America.
Owner: Lorie, with Ryan Spurr looped in once the account carries real multi-mill scope.
Success metric: A standing MSA or recurring engagement spanning at least two of the twelve tracks — not one closed deal that goes quiet.

Twelve Business Ideas With Vinicius Crescencio

Written as one continuous discovery call, broken into twelve movements. Each opens with why it lands specifically at Gerdau, then a rehearsal script — not real quotes from either person, built from public information about the account. Vinicius Crescencio, VP Finance for Gerdau North America, is used as the counterpart throughout because he's a real, confirmed, current executive whose role plausibly touches every budget conversation below while the Digital IT Leader seat sits open — not because Finance owns every technical detail; he defers those naturally to named colleagues within the dialogue itself.

01 OT/IT convergence 02 Ransomware resilience 03 IT leadership seat 04 S/4HANA continuity 05 Midlothian rollout kit 06 Rugged mobility 07 Vision AI safety 08 Circular IT 09 Predictive maintenance 10 Multi-mill data center 11 Power resilience 12 Trade-driven compliance

LORIE —Vinicius, thanks for the time. Before I pitch anything — congratulations on the Q2 numbers. North America carrying three-quarters of the company's EBITDA isn't a rounding error, that's the growth engine. I'd rather spend this call on where that momentum points next than on a slide deck.

VINICIUS —Fair enough. Most reps open with a catalog. Go ahead — where do you think it points?

OT/IT Convergence & Industrial Cybersecurity

SecurityOT

Manufacturing is publicly the #1 most-targeted sector for cyberattacks, and only 35% of manufacturers have achieved real IT/OT integration despite 81% calling it critical — a gap that widens every time a mill adds new melt-shop or downstream capacity, exactly what's happening at Midlothian right now.

LORIE —With Midlothian's new EAF capacity coming online this year, is the plant-floor network — the PLCs, the SCADA layer — segmented from your enterprise network today, or does that get sorted out as each phase goes live?
VINICIUS —Segmented in principle. Whether it's enforced consistently across every site, I honestly couldn't tell you without pulling in our operations team.
LORIE —That's the exact gap our Industrial Cybersecurity practice is built for — segmentation, DMZs, and centralized monitoring for converged OT/IT environments, not a repurposed enterprise security audit. Worth a scoped assessment on Midlothian specifically, given the timing?
VINICIUS —If it's scoped to Midlothian and doesn't turn into a company-wide audit nobody asked for, yes — send me something.

Ransomware Resilience Beyond Brazil

SecurityResilience

Gerdau's Global CISO Vitor Sena publicly championed a Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery rollout back in 2022 as a defense against ransomware compromising backups, described at the time as planned for international expansion beyond its initial Brazil deployment. Whether that expansion reached North America's mills is exactly the kind of detail worth confirming directly.

LORIE —Back in 2022 your Global CISO talked publicly about rolling out an isolated backup vault against ransomware, with plans to take it beyond Brazil. Did that ever reach the North America mills, or is that still a Brazil-only program?
VINICIUS —I'd have to check. That's really more a global security question than a Finance one.
LORIE —Fair — but if it hasn't crossed over yet, that's a tabletop exercise we can run here that costs you a room and an afternoon, not a purchase order. I'd rather help confirm the gap than assume it's already closed.
VINICIUS —Send the scope. I'll route it to whoever's covering security while the seat's in transition.

The Open IT Leadership Seat

RelationshipTiming

Claudio Fuhrmann Schneider, architect of Gerdau Long Steel North America's S/4HANA migration, left for Refresco in 2025 after five years in the role. A "Digital IT Leader" requisition for Tampa surfaced afterward and has since rotated off the job board — meaning it's either been quietly filled or is still open. Either way, whoever eventually holds that seat inherits every vendor relationship already in the room.

LORIE —I noticed your last Digital IT Leader role here turned over in 2025, and I couldn't confirm publicly whether it's been filled since. Has that seat landed with someone yet?
VINICIUS —It's in progress. I won't get ahead of an announcement, but there's movement there.
LORIE —Understood — I'm not fishing for a name before it's official. I'd just rather build the relationship with your team now, so whoever lands in that seat isn't starting from zero with us. Useful if I check back in once it's settled, rather than cold-calling whoever it turns out to be?
VINICIUS —That's the right way to handle it. I'll keep you posted.

Keeping the S/4HANA Migration on Track

ERPContinuity

The S/4HANA migration was Schneider's stated capstone project before he left — meaning it's mid-flight, high-stakes, and missing its architect. A migration losing its owner mid-cutover is a textbook moment for outside integration and managed-services support, not a reason to wait.

LORIE —With the S/4HANA migration mid-stream when your last IT lead departed — is that program still tracking to its original timeline, or has it slowed while the seat's open?
VINICIUS —Slower than I'd like to admit. Nobody wants to make a big call on it without the right person in the chair.
LORIE —That's a specific, bounded piece of work we can help with regardless of who's in that chair — integration and managed-services continuity so the migration doesn't stall waiting on a hire. Worth a conversation with whoever's acting as interim owner?
VINICIUS —Possibly. I'd want that framed as support, not a takeover, before I put you in front of anyone.

A Standardized Rollout Kit for Midlothian

InfrastructureDeployment

Midlothian is 74% physically complete with an H2 2026 startup — meaning whatever network, device, and security infrastructure the new capacity needs is being decided right now, ad hoc, under deadline pressure, unless someone brings a pre-built standard to the table first.

LORIE —With Midlothian this close to startup, is the new capacity's IT footprint — network drops, endpoints, badge readers — being built to some existing site standard, or does each expansion phase improvise its own setup?
VINICIUS —Improvise is probably fair. Every site's ended up a little different.
LORIE —We ship a pre-provisioned, zero-touch kit built exactly for this — new capacity gets a tested, standardized IT footprint instead of a one-off build, and it's faster to stand up under a deadline like this one. Worth pricing out before the rest of Midlothian's phases lock in their own version of "improvised"?
VINICIUS —If it saves us from redoing this every time we expand, yes.

Rugged Mobility for Growing Downstream Lines

MobilityField Devices

Midlothian's new solar-pile and wind-energy-product lines mean more field crews and more devices leaving the controlled plant floor — exactly the wear-and-tear pattern that breaks standard consumer-grade tablets.

LORIE —With the new solar-pile and wind-product lines, I'd guess you've got more crews and devices moving outside the main plant floor than you used to. What's your device breakage rate looking like on that gear?
VINICIUS —Higher than the fixed-line stuff, for sure. We replace more than we'd like.
LORIE —We standardize field fleets on Zebra or Panasonic Toughbook hardware with OtterBox or UAG rugged cases at the SKU level, plus a repair-or-replace depot so a cracked screen doesn't take a device out of service mid-shift. Worth pricing that against what you're replacing today?
VINICIUS —Send me the comparison. That's an easy number to check.

Vision AI to Protect a Record Safety Streak

SafetyAI

Gerdau's leadership — up to CEO Werneck himself — has repeatedly and publicly highlighted the company's lowest-ever accident frequency rate. That's a record worth protecting, and Connection's manufacturing-safety partners (Meraki MV, Plainsight, Chooch Vision AI) are built for exactly that: near-miss and unsafe-behavior detection layered onto cameras already in place.

LORIE —Gustavo's talked publicly about your record-low accident rate more than once — that's clearly something leadership is proud of. Is that trend being tracked with any camera-based monitoring today, or still mostly incident reporting after the fact?
VINICIUS —Mostly after the fact, honestly. Cameras are there for security, not really for that.
LORIE —That's exactly the gap our vision-AI safety partners close — layering near-miss and unsafe-behavior detection onto camera feeds you likely already have, rather than reacting only once something's happened. Worth a pilot on one line before it's a plant-wide ask?
VINICIUS —If it protects the number Gustavo keeps bragging about, I'm listening.

Circular IT, the Way You Already Think About Steel

SustainabilityITAD

Gerdau markets itself as one of the world's largest steel recyclers — processing roughly 10 million tonnes of scrap a year, with company messaging built entirely around steel's infinite recyclability. Connection has real, audited circularity numbers of its own — but has never packaged that story for a manufacturing client. This is the one conversation in the dossier nobody else has had with Gerdau yet.

LORIE —This one's a bit different — you build your entire identity around steel never having to hit a landfill. We run the same philosophy on IT hardware, with real numbers behind it: tons of material recycled, tens of thousands of retired devices processed through proper disposition, and most of what comes back through our depot gets refurbished and redeployed instead of scrapped. Does end-of-life handling for your device fleet get that kind of discipline today, or does it mostly just... go somewhere?
VINICIUS —Honestly, it mostly just goes somewhere. Nobody's built a story around it the way you're describing.
LORIE —Then this is worth a real conversation on its own — not a compliance checkbox, an actual circularity narrative that matches how you already talk about your own product. I don't think anyone's pitched you this angle before.
VINICIUS —They haven't. That's worth a follow-up on its own, separate from everything else.

Predictive Maintenance — and Whether the Digital Twin Comes Here

AIDigital Twin

Gerdau already has two live proof points for predictive maintenance and digital twins — a GE Digital pilot that caught pre-failure issues on 50 monitored assets, and Ubiratã, Gerdau Next's digital-twin joint venture with SpaceTime Labs, which launched at Ouro Branco with stated plans to expand to other Gerdau units across the Americas. Nobody's confirmed publicly whether North America is on that roadmap.

LORIE —I read that Ubiratã — the digital-twin venture out of Gerdau Next — is planned to expand to other Gerdau units across the Americas after Ouro Branco. Is North America anywhere on that roadmap, or is this still Brazil-only for now?
VINICIUS —I genuinely don't know the timeline on that. It's more Rodrigo's group than mine.
LORIE —Fair enough — if and when it does head this way, the edge compute, sensor networking, and integration work underneath a digital twin is exactly our lane, and it's a lot easier to build that runway before the rollout lands than to retrofit it after. Useful if I raised it directly with Rodrigo's team rather than routing it through Finance?
VINICIUS —Probably, yes. I can make the introduction if it comes to that.

Consistent Compute Across Eight Mills

Data CenterEdge

Eight North America mills, each generating its own OT and AI workloads, is quietly a data-center-architecture decision: standardize hyperconverged infrastructure at each site, centralize into fewer hubs, or lean on edge colocation. Nobody's said out loud which path Gerdau NA is on.

LORIE —With eight mills each running their own local systems, is compute standardized site to site, or does each one end up a little different depending on when it was last upgraded?
VINICIUS —Different, is the honest answer. Some sites are newer than others.
LORIE —That's a Nutanix or VMware hyperconverged conversation more than anything exotic — standardized, resilient compute at each site, with Expedient's colocation as overflow or DR capacity rather than building everything in-house. Worth a site-by-site capacity review before the next mill gets its own one-off build?
VINICIUS —If it stops us reinventing this at every site, sure — bring me something.

Power Resilience, Scoped Honestly

PowerResilience

A mill investing directly in its own 80MW solar generation is a company thinking hard about power. Connection doesn't power a furnace — but the control room, the network gear, and the IT layer riding on top of it still need clean, monitored backup power, and that's a scoped, honest conversation rather than an oversell.

LORIE —I saw Gerdau's investing directly in its own solar generation for the Texas site — tells me power reliability is already a board-level topic there, not an afterthought. Separate from the furnace itself: how's UPS and battery-health monitoring covered for the control room and network gear everything else depends on?
VINICIUS —Honestly not something I think about — that's more a facilities question.
LORIE —That's exactly the layer we're built for — not the megawatt-scale generation, just making sure the systems monitoring and running it stay up through a grid event. Eaton's Intelligent Power Manager gives remote battery-health visibility across a site without a truck roll. Worth a quick audit scoped just to the control and network layer?
VINICIUS —If it's scoped that narrowly, sure. Loop in facilities and I'll sit in.

Compliance That Keeps Pace With Growth

ComplianceTrade Policy

Section 232's 50% duties are the single biggest tailwind behind North America's current order backlog and margin expansion — but management has flagged the pending USMCA renegotiation as a real uncertainty. Growing capacity fast under a trade-policy tailwind that could shift is exactly when audit-ready IT/OT governance matters most, so growth doesn't outrun the paperwork behind it.

LORIE —With backlog over a hundred days and Midlothian ramping, you're clearly scaling fast while the tariff picture holds. Is your IT and OT compliance posture — ISO 27001, NIST, whatever your customers or insurers ask for — scaling at the same pace, or is that a "catch up later" item?
VINICIUS —Catch up later, if I'm honest. Growth's been the priority.
LORIE —That's worth getting ahead of now rather than after an audit or an insurance renewal forces the question — a compliance readiness assessment scoped to keep pace with the expansion, not a bolt-on after the fact. I can fold that into the same proposal as the Midlothian OT assessment so it's one conversation, not two.
VINICIUS —Bundle it. One proposal's easier to get approved than three.

VINICIUS —You clearly did the homework. Most of what you've raised, I either already worry about or should be worrying about — I just don't have twelve budget lines open at once.

LORIE —Then let's not open twelve at once. Pick the one with the least friction to start — I'd guess the Midlothian OT/IT convergence assessment, since it's scoped, dated, and doesn't need a company-wide sign-off.

The Close

Leave with one committed next step, not twelve open threads.

LORIE —Here's what I'll do: scope the Midlothian OT/IT convergence assessment and the compliance-readiness piece as one bundled proposal, since they solve adjacent problems on the same timeline. I'll draft the ITAD/circularity story and the vision-AI safety pilot as standalone one-pagers, since neither needs Midlothian's deadline to justify itself. Everything else — rugged mobility, the multi-mill data center review, power, the digital-twin question for Rodrigo's team — stays ready to pull off the shelf.
VINICIUS —Send the Midlothian bundle first. I'll get it in front of the right people once I see it's scoped the way you're describing.
LORIE —Done — you'll have it by end of week. And I'd like thirty minutes once whoever's landing in the Digital IT Leader seat is in place, so I'm not starting that relationship from a cold email.

This week: Send Vinicius the bundled Midlothian OT/IT convergence + compliance-readiness scope — dated, bounded, no company-wide sign-off required.
On acceptance: Propose the standardized Midlothian rollout kit (Manufacturing in a Box / Zero-Touch Provisioning) as the natural next phase, timed to the H2 2026 startup window.
Parallel track: Leave one-pagers on rugged mobility, vision-AI safety, circular IT/ITAD, and the multi-mill data-center review — sized for whenever budget opens.
Relationship track: Check back with Vinicius specifically once the Digital IT Leader seat is confirmed filled — don't cold-call whoever it turns out to be.
Escalation: Chia Yuan Wang is the senior-most confirmed NA decision-maker for anything needing capital-committee sign-off; Rodrigo Silveira is the right door for anything AI/digital-twin-shaped, once introduced through Vinicius.

Sources

Gerdau's financials, leadership names, and capital-project details are built from Gerdau's own investor-relations pages and press releases, trade press (Steel Market Update, Recycling Today, AIST, SteelOrbis, Fastmarkets), Microsoft's and GE's own customer case-study pages, and public LinkedIn/theorg.com profiles — not guessed. Connection's service and partner details come from connection.com, community.connection.com, and Connection's own 2025 Sustainability Report. The dialogue in the twelve-conversation section is a rehearsal script for Lorie to practice with, built from public information — not a transcript of anything anyone has actually said to Connection. Several items are explicitly flagged rather than assumed: whether Gerdau North America's Digital IT Leader seat is currently filled, interim, or open; exact FY2025 employee headcount (sources range ~25,500–30,100+, unreconciled without the FY2025 20-F, which returned an access error on every direct-fetch attempt); a specific numeric 2025 safety/accident-frequency rate (only qualitative "lowest-ever" language was found); current DJSI and CDP letter-grade standing (a CDP disclosure profile exists but its score wasn't retrievable through search); and named individuals for VP Operations/Manufacturing, VP Human Resources, and VP Sustainability/ESG at Gerdau North America (none could be confirmed). A RocketReach org-chart entry naming "Rapeal Bruce" as Gerdau North America's CEO was checked, found to contradict the well-corroborated Chia Yuan Wang, and excluded as an unreliable aggregator artifact. Verify current titles and program status directly before a real meeting.