The challenge

Cognizant is a global information technology (IT) services company that helps companies modernize technology, re-imagine processes, and transform experiences to achieve a competitive advantage. In 2024, it was named one of Wall Street Journal’s “250 Best-Managed Companies” and recognized for its leadership in developing, assessing, and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) systems in a safe, trustworthy, and ethical way.

To support its diverse global client base, Cognizant relies on the skills and experience of more than 336,000 employees. In addition to its permanent workforce, Cognizant depends on an agile workforce of more than 17,000 external contractors with specialized skills to give the company the flexibility it needs to meet its clients’ digital transformation challenges.

In 2016, Cognizant selected the IQ Navigator (IQN) vendor management system (VMS) to automate its contingent workforce management. IQN merged with Beeline, and in 2021 Cognizant upgraded to Beeline Enterprise VMS.

Through the years, Beeline has developed innovative solutions to meet Cognizant’s expanding needs. One of those recent needs was a way to reduce contingent staffing costs by automating a tenure rate amendment program between Cognizant and its most important staffing suppliers.

The solution

Cognizant has thousands of external contractors working on long-term assignments that can take years to complete. The contractors may work on a series of consecutive assignments without a break in continuity. Since most of these are revenue-generating assignments supporting Cognizant’s clients, any savings Cognizant’s global contingent workforce team can achieve accrues directly to the company’s bottom line.

Having negotiated tenure-based discounts with their most important staffing suppliers, the Cognizant team built a contractual structure to deliver millions of dollars in savings annually. However, since Cognizant’s external workforce is built up of hundreds of niche suppliers, they needed an automated solution to execute these tenure-based discounts to avoid the need for manual activities.

Fortunately, Beeline had the solution: an automated tenure rate amendment process in which Beeline Enterprise tracks each worker from onboarding to offboarding and amends the staffing agency’s bill rate at every milestone, as agreed with the supplier. If the bill rate is scheduled to be discounted after 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, or at any other intervals negotiated with the supplier, all systems are updated accordingly, and the amended rates are applied. The rate the staffing supplier pays to the contractor is unaffected, and no manual adjustments are required.