Purchasing at Michelin Group is organized within a Corporate Business Services model and linked to an operational department. Each year, the Michelin Group makes nearly €16 billion in purchases, supported by more than 750 purchasing professionals worldwide. These teams are tasked with delivering €250 million in annual purchasing savings.
Like Michelin’s other support functions such as finance and HR, purchasing is directly linked to an operational department within a Global Business Services (GBS) organization, designed to operate and implement end-to-end processes. This GBS entity employs around 4,000 people globally.
“This centralization of operations across different functions has already enabled us to optimize efficiency, governance, and achieve cost reductions,” explains François Robin, Lead Process Engineer of P2P at Michelin. “Our objective was therefore to develop the coverage of these service centers in order to gain efficiency in activities requiring a higher level of expertise and business knowledge, such as specialist processes and call center operations.”
The project: strengthening the effectiveness of the core model
At Michelin, a process-driven approach has been important for several years, and when the Basware project was launched in 2024, key performance indicators were already at a strong level.
“In recent years, we successfully rolled out the new process to reach 75% invoice coverage with POs,” explains François Robin. “However, we still had to find a process for invoices without POs. At the same time, our transformation initiatives increased our on-time payment rate to 93%.” Despite these results, the group set itself the objective of achieving operational excellence across its entire P2P process. Michelin, which had already worked on harmonizing its ERP systems by migrating to Oracle and transformed its GBS organization to establish service centers, wanted to take the next step in simplifying its core model.
“Our core model was still complex, with multiple tools to cover the process including OCR, validation workflows, and archiving as well as multiple invoice receiving channels such as PDF/OCR, portal, and EDI,” explains François Robin. “It also lacked agility, particularly when it came to adapting to new regulations and new e-invoicing mandates.” The organization also had limited visibility into manual activities analysis. In addition, invoice-to-order reconciliation automation was constrained, with limited capability to analyze invoice types in greater detail to automatically route them through the appropriate workflows. “Throughout the project, we wanted to maintain the performance levels of our service centers,” he adds.
A wave-by-wave deployment of Basware in an Oracle ERP environment
Michelin began evaluating P2P solutions capable of addressing these challenges. The solution needed to manage the invoice lifecycle, ensure compliance, and adapt to global e-invoicing mandates.
The chosen solution also had to integrate seamlessly with Michelin’s Oracle ERP environment and handle the high volume of invoices. Basware’s solution met all these requirements.
The solution was first deployed in Germany and Romania, followed by Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, and the Nordic countries. Michelin will complete the rollout across other European countries, before extending the deployment to America and Asia. By the end of the project, Michelin will have implemented the Basware solution in 40 countries.
“Our goal is to deploy our invoice validation workflows ahead of upcoming e-invoicing regulations coming into force, while also quickly taking advantage of the simplification of our new core model,” explains François Robin.
Quantifiable benefits from the pilot phases onwards
By using Basware’s SmartPDF AI, Michelin can analyze process data to identify the most time-consuming manual activities and focus on process improvements. “For example, as part of the e-invoicing mandates, we receive both traditional supplier invoices as well as invoices related to our employees’ travel and expense reports,” explains François Robin. “SmartPDF AI automatically determines the nature of the invoice and which validation circuit to route it to. In our two pilot projects in Germany and Romania, this step is already 85% automated. This performance was achieved as soon as the solution was implemented.”
Basware SmartCoding also enables Michelin to further simplify and secure the coding of its non-order invoices, freeing operational teams to focus on the approval process rather than data entry. In the pilot phase, Michelin quickly achieved a 40% rate of touchless invoices.
Finally, as part of the Basware implementation, Michelin sought to ensure that its previous efficiency levels were maintained. To this end, the company measured and stabilized its on-time payment rate and the number of FTEs required after the deployment of Basware. The company then looked at the efficiency of its processes to improve performance, particularly in terms of FTEs per document.
