How Renault Group Uses Celonis to Generate €15 Million in Annual P2P Savings

Renault Group has built 125 years of automotive heritage on precision engineering and operational discipline. As one of Europe’s largest vehicle manufacturers — selling 2.265 million vehicles across 36 countries in 2024 — the company runs a correspondingly large procurement apparatus, with invoice volumes, supplier relationships, and payment workflows that demand continuous oversight at scale.

Before deploying Celonis, Renault’s Process Intelligence team faced a structural dilemma: fixing surface-level symptoms in accounts payable (late payments, duplicate invoices, credit memo errors) delivered short-term cash recovery but didn’t address the root causes driving those inefficiencies. The team needed a dual strategy — capturing quick wins to demonstrate ROI while simultaneously applying the Lean Six Sigma DMAIC framework to permanently re-engineer faulty process steps.

Renault selected Celonis following a proof-of-concept that quantified the value potential within its AP process. The Celonis marketplace provided ready-made applications for tracking credit memos and duplicate invoices, enabling the team to trace every euro of recovered value to a specific invoice or delivery note from day one. Simultaneously, the Process Intelligence platform generated the quantitative measurements needed to feed the DMAIC ‘Measure’ and ‘Analyze’ phases, complementing the qualitative input from subject matter experts.

The results validated the strategy decisively. Renault realized its first €1 million in savings within three months of go-live — and €15 million across the first 12 months. Central to this velocity was the Center of Excellence structure Julien Nauroy and his team built: a hybrid of IT experts, Lean/DMAIC methodologists, and finance business owners who collectively owned both the technical implementation and the P&L accountability. Working alongside Celonis’s co-innovation programs, the CoE is also developing an AI model to predict and prevent late supplier payments before they occur — shifting from reactive recovery to proactive process control.

Looking ahead, Renault’s CoE is building toward a C-suite control tower that provides live visibility into all core operational processes. With object-centric process mining feeding well-structured data models to AI systems, the company anticipates that Process Intelligence will become the connective tissue enabling more agile and resilient core processes across the entire enterprise.