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Case study

The challenge

Inmarsat, a leader in global mobile satellite communications, discovered inefficiencies in its internal and external processes after years of growth through numerous acquisitions. During a four-year period of global expansion, Inmarsat found itself maintaining and operating 38 disparate billing applications and tools, 40% of which were no longer supported due to legacy IT infrastructure and complexity arising from having 5,200 different pricing plans and more than 2,400 product, service and subscription plans. The significant gaps in systems and business processes limited its commercial competitiveness. Inmarsat also faced other challenges—longer lead times and higher costs to launch new products and services, lack of clarity and accuracy as customers received multiple bills, inefficiencies caused by manual billing and higher risk in business continuity, relatability and stability due to different billing systems aged 10–20 years. The billing errors and mediocre user experience affected customer experience (CX). Inmarsat engaged Cognizant to create a seamless, end-to-end experience for all billing interactions.

Our approach

Cognizant—a trusted long-time partner of Inmarsat—implemented the approved, four-phase OneIT solution that included discovery, design, build and business migration over the course of 45 months. Based on industry best practices and specific commercial requirements, we simplified disparate billing capabilities into a single, standard and scalable platform. We also helped add pricing flexibility, dynamic discounting and the agility to support future commercial models for new products, services and go-to-market strategies. Implementing commercial off-the-shelf billing technology enabled the company to achieve the lowest total cost of ownership, while a single, core application facilitated business process rationalization and reduced the complexity and cost of having multiple integration points. With internal billing operations, Inmarsat now also has the flexibility to meet rapidly changing needs without contractual overhead and the significant interdependencies that come with other OneIT rationalization programs.

Significant business benefits with simplified OneIT billing operations

Transforming disparate billing capabilities into a single scalable platform gave Inmarsat the commercial agility, CX and operational efficiency it needed to support growth. By redefining processes within a single, simple and scalable billing platform, the company achieved a range of benefits—$4 million in annual savings, reduced legacy rate plans by 70%, improved efficiency for revenue posting each month by 85% and increased overall business performance by 50%. The new solution also eliminated the risk of system obsolescence and material failure in billing processes while employing security that complies with cybersecurity policies.

$4M

annual savings on OpEx and CapEx costs

70%

reduction in legacy rate plans

Up to 80%

reduction in time required to implement pricing updates

5 days

reduction in daily sales outstanding