A leading U.S. logistics firm was hampered by an old, decentralized billing system that desperately needed modernization

Atos helped retire the legacy system and build a modern, billed data repository platform projected to manage 1.3 million invoices daily and save $5 million in costs per year.

The challenge

A Fortune 50 U.S. logistics company used separate billing data repositories for each of its operating divisions across the globe.

This large, complex set of mainframe applications was expensive to maintain and hard to scale. Legacy systems are also notoriously inflexible, so adding new functionality was difficult and risky. Moreover, batch processing meant the shipper had no real-time access to this critical data.

In order to reduce the cost of ownership and implement new capabilities, the shipper needed to consolidate these invoice repositories into a modern, single source of billing data.

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The solution

After a thorough analysis of the shipper’s existing systems, Atos identified four key modernization workstreams:

Consolidating data stores
Migrating and cleansing records
Eliminating redundant interfaces
Decommissioning legacy systems

Atos built a custom data-validation utility to compare more than 1,000 fields in the source and target databases. The utility analyzed and cleansed 250 million customer records and 1.5 billion invoices to ensure data quality prior to migration. Then, the data was migrated in phases from a distributed group of outdated IMS databases into a modern, centralized billing data repository built on Oracle.

Business benefit

The new billing database acts as a centralized hub for managing invoices from 185 countries, ensuring future scalability, and enabling better analytics and reporting.

In addition, the new system is much more flexible and easier to update, with an estimated 30% cost savings on future enhancements.

By moving from legacy to Java, the shipper’s mainframe workload was reduced by more than 1,500 MIPS (million instructions per second). This reduction in mainframe processing is projected to generate more than $18 million in savings over the next five years.

The modernization is expected to net the client an additional savings of $4.5 million on labor and $5.5 million on data center costs over the same period — for a total of nearly $29 million over five years.