Case Study: Major Mining Company achieves $4M year-one savings and optimized worker accommodations with Cognizant

Mining AI for Added Value in Worker Accommodations

A multinational mining and minerals-processing company struggled to billet thousands of employees and contractors across owned and contracted camps spread over a large region. Varying shift patterns, mixed lodging privileges, fluctuating contracted rates and limited scheduling software made assignments slow, error-prone and costly, producing under- and over-utilized housing and heavy clerical effort.

Cognizant built an AI-driven scheduling optimization engine and cloud analytics platform (AWS, R, Tibco Spotfire) to automate room assignments, handle real-time changes, identify complementary rosters and forecast five-year accommodation needs. The solution improved occupancy and cut waste, delivering about $4M in year-one savings, forecasting $20M from better utilization and roughly halving costs tied to no-shows and record/reporting errors.