Michelin is a leading, global tire manufacturer headquartered in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne region of France. The company is dedicated to sustainably improving the mobility of goods and people by manufacturing and marketing tires for every type of vehicle, including airplanes, automobiles, bicycles, motorcycles, earthmovers, off road equipment and trucks. Michelin is present in more than 170 countries and operates 68 production plants in 17 different countries. In addition to the Michelin brand, the company owns a strong brand portfolio, including BFGoodrich, Kleber, Tigar, Riken, Kormoran, and the Uniroyal brand for the North American market, among others.
A few years ago, the company decided to launch a transformational sales and operations planning (S&OP) project in response to several challenges it was facing. Michelin’s supply chain complexity had increased substantially and had become more difficult to manage due to scarce capacity, a growing portfolio of tire types and a significant increase in parts resulting from the company’s innovation efforts. The market in which the company operates had also become increasingly volatile and competitive, as well as impacted by seasonal demand.
After a thorough analysis of its existing S&OP decision-making processes, Michelin’s executive management team realized it needed to replace its legacy tools and processes, which didn’t have the flexibility necessary to support its transformation. The project - named the Sharp S&OP project – kicked off in January 2018 encapsulating its main worldwide Michelin business units, which are now driven by JDA’s S&OP solutions.
“Michelin continues to invest in supply chain innovations – such as information systems, logistics and digital services – to improve customer service,” said Anthony Caumond, enterprise architect for supply chain, Michelin. “We selected JDA as a natural extension of our broad JDA footprint, so we can standardize on a single, end-to-end supply chain solution globally.”
Michelin deployed JDA’s agile implementation approach, which includes a sequence of three-week sprints of designing, constructing, testing and validating the solution. This rapid prototyping methodology enabled the team to learn and mature quickly in their use of the solution while achieving results through each phase of the project. In addition, the company joined JDA’s S&OP Special Interest Group, which enabled them to learn from other customers’ experiences and best practices when implementing the solution.
With JDA, Michelin can now better share within the business unit executive team a common demand, sales and production plan, as well as priorities management, and balance demand against capacity across a 12-18-month horizon. The solution supports a standardized process and network for sharing best practices and enables local simulations to support demand management in the regions, as well as capacity management at the plants – all using one set of data to ensure data consistency.
“We believe the Sharp S&OP project, supported by JDA will increase significantly visibility into future risks and constraints, thanks to scenarios shared across the organization,” said Pascal Zammit, senior vice president, Global Supply Chain for Michelin group. “Eventually, Sharp S&OP will help us drive better performance in the future.”
“We have enabled a digital transformation as an integral part of Michelin’s Sharp S&OP project at JDA,” said Johan Reventberg, president, JDA. “Michelin’s complex, make-to-stock planning process, long material lead times, lengthy production portfolio rotations and extended time to market for new products will no longer be an issue with the improved visibility, greater accountability and cross-functional alignment our team has initiated in this project. Michelin has already seen such great results, and we look forward to enabling them to cover the full span of their organization by the end of 2018.”