Sorina Burciu, Michelin CBS: “Talent development is one of our key pillars. We are preparing our people for advancing in their careers and for future jobs”

“We are celebrating 10 years for the Michelin Corporate Business Center which is based here in Bucharest. We are a team of 830 people, and we are servicing European business units and also, we are servicing our corporate function.

We have 10 years of experience, and we enlarged our operations and services in five functions. We have finance, we have order to cash, HR, logistics and personnel.

So, what we are prioritizing and how we are preparing ourselves for the future. First of all, I would mention three of our priorities. It’s about people development, it’s about service and scope extension, and it’s about services and our processes excellence,” Sorina Burciu, Director Michelin Corporate & Business Shared Services Bucharest said at Romanian Business Services Forum organized by Outsourcing Today and The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“And we are going to drive this through emerging technologies and through best practices to enable our innovation.

People development, and talent development is one of our key pillars in Michelin CBS. And we are preparing our people for advancing in their careers and for future jobs. We are preparing them by creating a context, by giving them the opportunity to develop themselves and to become the actor of their own development.

And more concretely, how do we do that? In 2024, we all share a common objective, which aims to increase, to enforce long life learning mindset. And by doing this, we are actually creating a culture where we are looking at our people needs, what they are interested in, and how we actually can respond to their needs.

We are creating and launching initiatives that would help them to develop in digitalization and not only, by launching communities and projects that would allow them to develop outside their jobs.

We have our citizen developers boot camp, which is an initiative that will allow people to develop themselves through innovative learning. Operational people are onboarding this program, and they can, together with their managers, select one or two skills that they would like to develop, mainly related to digitalization. It’s a six-month program, and they are coached actually. They are also taking a training path, which consists also in practicing their knowledge, not only in formal trainings. And they are delivering up to one or two automatizations by using different technologies, mainly they are using Microsoft Power Apps.

In 2023, we had 60 citizen developers, which were helped by 30 coaches, and they developed solutions for more than 60 internal projects that we have. Basically, they developed the automatizations.

Besides this, we also have Greenbelt community, where people who are certified, they have the opportunity to stay there in this community for one year and a half, maybe two years, and to develop solutions that would allow them to develop their skills as well.

We have an idea flow platform where everybody within our center can log in ETS for improvement. And citizen developers are helping in creating the solutions. They are helping in analyzing these ideas, if they are eligible or not. And if we are dealing with complex ideas, then they are directed to smart automation team or IT teams.

So, we are pushing this long-life learning mindset that allows people to develop themselves. It’s a continuous development process that helps, actually empowers our people to respond to their personal challenges and business challenges and at the end of the day, to drive our process.

I’ve been with Michelin for more than 8 years. I’ve been involved in different stages of our evolution. I started with transitioning activities, with standardisation, stabilisation, simplification. So, during my journey, I could observe how our leadership style had adapted. To be more competitive. To stay relevant.

And one of the levers that we used is to bring more transparency to the people. And how do we do that? We are doing it with different initiatives. For instance, individual performance. It is regularly assessed and documented in our system. And people have a good understanding of their performance, and how it is related to their payment. So, at Michelin our employees can see their salary level and can compare it with the market median which is available in our HR system. And this creates a lot of engagement and motivation, because people know that their efforts and their determination to deliver results is being recognised. And this boosts their confidence in our leadership and in decision making.”