Mining Services Giant Wins Industry Leader at the 2025 SAP Innovation Awards

The Client

The client is a global mining and metals services leader with $500M+ revenue, specializing in slag processing and metal recovery. Operating in over 30 locations worldwide, they provide mission-critical on-site services to the world’s largest steel producers.

Client Objective

After a strategic initiative to modernize their fragmented legacy systems, the client targeted the 2025 SAP Innovation Awards, specifically the Industry Leader category.

Their goal was to validate their shift from a traditional industrial contractor to a tech-enabled partner, showcasing their new SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Business AI environment.

Client Business Challenge 

The client possessed incredible performance metrics, but their internal draft was rushed and failed to capture the imagination.

• The draft was written by the technical implementation team. It focused on how they implemented SAP, rather than why it mattered to the steel industry's future.
• The client’s internal marketing team was focused on broader brand campaigns and lacked the specific technical fluency to translate their success into a compelling business story.
• Their narrative missed the sustainability angle, which was a key judging criterion for the 2025 awards, despite their work directly contributing to a circular economy.

Recognizing that a generic marketing agency wouldn't understand the nuances of the SAP ecosystem, the client sought a specialized partner. They selected Orange Bridge for five specific reasons:

• SAP Fluency: We didn't need to be taught what Clean Core or GROW with SAP meant. We understood their technology stack from Day 1, allowing us to hit the ground running without a lengthy onboarding phase.
• Operational Readiness: As an active member of the SAP Business Network, we offered a streamlined, compliant onboarding process. This allowed the client to bypass weeks of vendor setup red tape and immediately focus on the submission before the deadline.
• Judge’s Priorities Perspective: Having analyzed years of past winners, we knew exactly what the Industry Leader judges were looking for: operational resilience and measurable sustainability metrics.
• Bridge-Building: We offered the unique ability to sit between the client’s CIO (technical) and CMO (brand), unifying their disparate goals into a single, cohesive narrative.
• Dedicated SAP Innovation Awards Services: We provide specialized services tailored to the unique requirements of this program. Whether navigating the rigid slide limits of 2025 or the narrative focus of 2026, our workflow is purpose-built to align client stories with SAP’s latest strategic priorities.

Orange Bridge's Approach

We repositioned their entry using a low-friction workflow designed to respect their team's time:

• Streamlined data extraction: We know that technical SMEs are often too busy for endless discovery meetings. Instead, we utilized our proprietary Award Intake Questionnaire. This targeted questionnaire allowed us to bypass hours of SME interviews and extract the exact architectural details, business metrics, and human elements the judges needed - completely asynchronously.
• Sustainability pivot: We reframed their submission from an IT Upgrade story to a Green Steel story. We demonstrated how their real-time data visibility enabled more efficient scrap management and metal recovery, directly supporting their customers' decarbonization goals.
• Hard metric validation: We worked with their finance team to concrete the ROI, ensuring the final submission boldly claimed their efficiency gains and reduction in technical debt.

The Results

The client was named a Winner in the Industry Leader category for the 2025 SAP Innovation Awards.

This win placed them in an elite circle of global innovators.

• The win cemented their reputation as a digital pioneer in the heavy industrial sector, validating their "GROW with SAP" strategy against entries from top-tier enterprises around the world.
• The award served as a green light for the CIO to secure budget for the next phase of their roadmap, expanding the program to their European and Asian divisions.