Case Study: Michelin achieves 35% cost savings and real-time, event-driven inventory management with Confluent Cloud

Michelin Fuels Real-Time Inventory Management at Scale with Confluent

Michelin, the global tire manufacturer, struggled with maintaining open source Apache Kafka at scale—its self‑managed Kafka required full‑time maintenance, didn’t support a clear path to the cloud, and impeded real‑time visibility for inventory and supply‑chain systems. To address these challenges, Michelin engaged Confluent and evaluated Confluent Cloud as a cloud‑native, fully managed Kafka service.

Confluent implemented Confluent Cloud on Microsoft Azure, migrating mission‑critical workloads (including a rewritten online order orchestrator based on Kafka Streams) to a resilient, elastic streaming platform. Confluent Cloud helped Michelin reduce TCO and operational burden—estimating ~35% cost savings versus on‑premises, delivering 99.99% uptime, enabling 10TB/day throughput, freeing engineering teams for higher‑value work, and accelerating time‑to‑market by roughly 8–9 months. Confluent’s service and expertise were cited as key to these outcomes.

Michelin

Yves Caseau

Group Chief Digital & Information Officer