Michelin: €20.6 million saved through employee ideas

During the course of 2016, the workforce at Michelin submitted almost 60,000 ideas and suggestions to an online portal the tyre maker runs for this purpose. From these suggestions entered into the Progressive Ideas project’s ‘InnovaGO’ platform, Michelin states that 26,519 were “made a reality” and some 3,400 were “specially evaluated.” This final group of submissions is said to have led to net savings of 20.6 million euros.

“Our ambition is simple. Around 70,000 people, our employees, have access to the platform and we hope to collect 60,000 progressive ideas every year. Or more or less an average of one idea per person, per year,” writes Michelin in a statement. “We expect genuine commitment from our employees, and we must support them with genuine consideration and resources. With some 26,000 progressive ideas in 2016 (one out of every three suggested), we are demonstrating genuine follow-up and action.”

Michelin’s goal is to elicit and gather 100,000 ‘Progress and Innovation’ ideas by 2020. If achieved, these will join the more than 3 million suggestive and ideas submitted by Michelin employees since 1927. That year the tyre maker begun its Suggestions project, replacing it with Progressive Ideas in 1995.