Renault Group + Celonis

The partnership between Renault Group and Celonis really stepped on the gas, generating €15 million in the first 12 months due, in large part, to a well-structured Center of Excellence (CoE). Following quick wins in Accounts Payable (AP), Renault Group are expanding their use of Celonis across Procure-to-Pay (P2P). The CoE vision is to create a control tower that offers the C-suite a live view of all core operational processes to power strategic decision making.

Context: Transforming for next-gen automotive

Building on 125 years of proud history, Renault Group is at the forefront of progress in mobility. With more than 98,000 employees in 36 countries, Renault Group sold 2.265 million vehicles in 2024. Renault Group is leveraging Process Intelligence to drive process optimization efforts in P2P with a view to expanding into other processes across the operation.

Challenge: Generating quick wins while delivering long-term transformation

Renault Group’s Process Intelligence CoE strategy is to optimize core operational processes using the Lean Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) framework. As Julien Nauroy, IS/IT Domain Leader on Process Intelligence, Renault Group explains, “We want to find the root causes of the symptoms we have in our processes and actually fix them, not just keep them under control.”

However, pinpointing root causes and measuring results takes time. Consequently, Nauroy’s team adopted a dual strategy: driving long-term optimization while simultaneously seizing quick wins to deliver immediate value and secure an early ROI.

Following a proof-of-concept (PoC) that revealed the potential value in their AP process, Renault Group chose Celonis to help deliver these quick wins, and support the longer-term improvement strategy. According to Nauroy, “We evaluated the competition and chose Celonis because of the speed of the implementation, the productivity that we have with the team, the scalability of the platform, and the marketplace in which we found the apps that helped us deliver value very quickly.”

Solution: A two-pronged approach to solve symptoms and find root causes

Renault Group initially used Celonis to tackle process inefficiencies within P2P, such as late payments and overpayments. While securing immediate cash recovery, this approach also highlighted structural areas for improvement to drive long-term process excellence. This was largely achieved using the apps available on the Celonis marketplace for activities such as tracking credit memos and duplicate invoices.

Nauroy says, “Every euro of value that we make, we can track it down to the invoice or to the delivery note that it‘s related to. And that's how we demonstrated a positive ROI from the first day.” Renault Group realized their first €1 million in value within three months of implementing the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform. In the first 12 months the team had realized €15 million.

Nauroy credits this success to a unique collaborative ecosystem. The CoE itself is a hybrid structure, combining IT experts with Lean/DMAIC methodologists. This team partners closely with finance business experts, responsible for value delivery and driving the business priorities. This alliance of technology, methodology, and finance allows the group to address every angle of the transformation – technical, structural, and financial – and deliver value at exceptional speed.

The Celonis Platform also supports Renault Group's DMAIC approach to long-term process improvement. Nauroy outlines how Process Intelligence delivers quantitative information to complement the qualitative information provided by subject matter experts, and how it is used in both the ‘Measure’ and ‘Analyze’ phases of the DMAIC framework. This allows the team to move beyond quick fixes and re-engineer process steps for sustainable performance.

In just one example of this two-pronged approach, the Renault Group team uses Celonis to identify supplier invoices that are likely to be paid late and ensure they are paid on time. In parallel, Renault Group and Celonis are co-developing an AI solution to predict and anticipate late payments so the issues can be fixed permanently.

Renault Group already use a variety of AI solutions from Celonis, including the Machine Learning Workbench and Prediction Builder. They’re also using Process Copilot so end users can speak naturally to the AI and interact directly with Celonis data sets or knowledge models without needing in-depth understanding of how the Celonis Platform works.

Vision: A control tower for the C-suite to inform decision making

The CoE’s long-term vision is to use Celonis to build a control tower where the C-suite can see all operational processes across the company, understand how they’re behaving, and make decisions based on live data.

Renault Group’s team are impressed with the speed of development with Celonis, particularly the way they can introduce new apps and new dashboards in a matter of hours because everyone is interacting around a single knowledge model. Nauroy recalls, “One piece of feedback I had from the business is that instead of waiting weeks to get a result with any data platform that we use internally, the problem was solved in less than one hour just by discussing and doing demos live.”

Nauroy also looks forward to Process Intelligence being a key ingredient in the CoE’s AI strategy for the Group. He says, “To benefit from AI you need good data that's well-structured, and that's where Process Intelligence and Celonis come into play. Using object-centric process mining we can go from having the data as it is in the original system to a well-structured model that makes sense to the AI, to be used to to give more accurate answers. Ultimately, this combination of AI and Process Intelligence will be the catalyst for evolving our core processes, making them more agile and resilient.”