3M Extends Relationship With Cognizant

Cognizant has announced that it has entered into a multiyear, multimillion-dollar agreement with 3M. The agreement extends Cognizant’s strategic relationship with 3M and encompasses a wide range of application development and related services to drive operational efficiencies and improve productivity.

As part of the engagement, Cognizant will leverage an innovative outcome-based, managed services engagement model with committed productivity benefits over the long-term. Cognizant will leverage its proprietary best practices and frameworks to reduce the total cost of ownership and ensure high quality and consistency across 3M’s applications portfolio, including mission- critical software used in research and development, planning, sourcing and supply chain, manufacturing, sales and marketing, e-commerce, human resources, finance, and administration.

By enabling accelerated product innovation and time-to-market, Cognizant will help 3M realise its strategic business objectives, augment production capacity, enhance global capabilities, and rationalise costs. As a knowledge-intensive company that applies several distinct technology platforms to a wide array of customer needs in diverse markets, 3M will also benefit from Cognizant 2.0 – Cognizant’s global knowledge-sharing, collaboration, program management and social computing platform – to optimise its strategic IT investments and leverage its knowledge assets to achieve newer levels of innovation and virtualisation.

“Cognizant’s innovative outcome-based engagement model and proven applications and manufacturing industry expertise will help accelerate our efforts to drive cost efficiencies and further transform the relationship we began in 2001,” said Ernie Park, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, 3M.

“Cognizant’s best practices will enhance decision-making, improve service-level predictability, reduce defects through applications testing and quality assurance services, and help us more efficiently and cost-effectively scale production up and down based on dynamic global market demands,” said Janel Haider, Director, Applications Center of Excellence, 3M.

“We are honored to support 3M in its efforts to drive business effectiveness, help 3M adapt to changing business needs, and further strengthen its innovation agenda to drive future growth,” said Francisco D’Souza, President and CEO, Cognizant.

“The transition to a managed services model represents a significant evolution in our relationship with 3M. Cognizant is bringing its global execution model, knowledge management, and innovation culture to enable this transformation and ensure continuing productivity and operational improvements,” said Francisco D’Souza. “With deep domain experience in the manufacturing industry and a focus on new delivery models, Cognizant will help 3M mine efficiencies from existing systems and leverage those savings to fund strategic initiatives.”