How CGI Automated Data Center Metering and Billing with Exivity

Customer story

CGI is a global IT and business consulting services organization providing services across industries including telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, transportation, systems integration, and managed IT services.

Within CGI US, the Global Technology Operations (GTO) organization needed a better way to manage the metering and billing of its on-premises services.

The existing process relied heavily on manually collecting and compiling usage information. Service charges were calculated monthly, which meant consumption information was generally only available as part of the end-of-month billing cycle.

CGI US needed to make this process faster, more accurate, and significantly less dependent on manual effort.

Exivity provided the platform to collect usage data from multiple infrastructure systems, transform it into standardized usage records, apply customer and service information, calculate charges, and make current consumption data available through a web interface.

The challenge: manual data collection and monthly billing

CGI's challenge centered around two areas: limited availability of current consumption data and a lack of automation.

Originally, services were charged monthly, with consumption summaries becoming available at the end of the billing period.

Producing those bills required considerable manual effort. Staff first had to collect raw usage information, after which additional employees were involved in compiling and preparing the data for billing.

This created administrative overhead and meant that information about changing infrastructure consumption was not immediately reflected in customer billing.

CGI wanted to move away from this monthly, manually intensive process toward a model in which infrastructure consumption could be collected and processed much more frequently.

Bringing infrastructure data together

CGI's service delivery environment contained information across multiple systems.

Exivity was configured to pull or receive data from CGI US GTO systems responsible for areas including:

• Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

• Hypervisors

• Storage management

• Backup

• Networking

The incoming data could then be correlated with service profiles and customer identifiers to create usage records.

Those usage records were processed using the appropriate rate cards and loaded into Exivity's charge database, making consumption and charge information available to users through the Exivity web interface.

This created a repeatable flow from infrastructure data → customer and service context → usage records → rates → charges → reporting.

From monthly reporting to next-morning visibility

One of the most important changes was the frequency at which CGI could access its usage information.

Previously, consumption data was compiled once per month and was only as current as the latest Delivery Tower report.

With Exivity, data could be received from CGI's CMDB nightly, processed through scheduled workflows, and published automatically each morning.

If a new virtual machine was created during the day, for example, it could be reflected in Exivity by the following morning.

As a result, Delivery Tower staff no longer needed to manually produce monthly usage reports. Instead, they could access Exivity directly through their browser to view current consumption, historical information, and trends for their Delivery Tower.

What CGI needed

CGI US required a solution capable of:

• Automating the collection and processing of infrastructure usage data

• Reducing manual billing activities

• Providing more timely consumption information

• Mapping infrastructure usage to customers and services

• Applying rates and business logic consistently

• Providing detailed per-customer reporting

• Integrating usage and charge information with financial systems

• Tracking the internal cost of resources used to deliver services

Exivity provided a framework for connecting these operational and financial processes.

How the solution works

1. Collecting infrastructure data

CGI wanted to measure and apply financial metrics to information held within its CMDB and other infrastructure systems.

Exivity accepts data pushed from the CMDB nightly. Scheduled workflows process the extracted datasets and publish the resulting information each morning.

This allows usage and charge information to become available significantly earlier than under the previous end-of-month process.

Even services charged monthly can be represented using daily data, allowing draft monthly bills to be viewed before the billing period is complete.

2. Transforming and enriching usage data

Raw infrastructure information does not necessarily contain all the context required for billing.

Exivity Transformers prepare incoming data to become usable consumption records. During this process, data can be normalized and mapped to customer and service information.

For CGI, this included processing information relating to:

• Customers

• Services

• Prices

• Customer aliases and identifiers

• Services used by internal Delivery Towers

• Federal Cloud customers

Additional datasets and lookup information could be used where direct logical mappings were unavailable, allowing exceptions and customer-specific business rules to be incorporated into the process.

3. Applying rates and generating charges

Once consumption records were prepared, Exivity could apply the appropriate rates and charging logic.

This transformed technical infrastructure consumption into financial information that could be viewed by account.

CGI staff could then access current usage, historical consumption, and trends through the Exivity interface and export information when required.

Usage information could also be passed to CGI's financial system to update accounts within its ERP.

Operating at scale

The CGI implementation demonstrates the scale at which this process operates.

At the time documented in the case study, CGI US GTO used Exivity to meter and report commodity usage across approximately 195 different accounts, each consuming a subset of more than 200 active services.

On a typical day, approximately 40,000 usage records were compiled.

Automating the processing of this volume of data removed the need for Delivery Tower staff to manually assemble recurring monthly reports while providing significantly more timely access to consumption information.

Benefits realized

Faster reflection of infrastructure changes

Changes in resource allocation that previously might not appear until the end of the month, or require manual corrections, could instead be reflected in billing within hours.

This meant changes in service consumption could flow through to customer billing much more quickly.

Detailed per-customer consumption visibility

CGI gained clearer and more detailed views of current consumption on a per-customer basis.

Staff could access the Exivity web interface to review current usage, historical information, and consumption trends without waiting for a manually prepared monthly report.

Automated billing with less manual effort

Automating the collection, transformation, rating, and reporting of usage data reduced the number of FTEs required to support the billing process.

This replaced an otherwise manual workflow while also reducing the administrative overhead associated with preparing recurring reports.

Fewer billing errors

Reducing manual data handling also reduced opportunities for errors within the billing workflow.

Consistent data transformation and charging logic provided a more repeatable process for converting infrastructure usage into customer billing information.

Contract value compared with actual spend

The increased level of cost and consumption visibility also enabled CGI to compare customer contract value with actual spend.

This gave CGI another perspective on the financial performance of the services it delivered.

Better visibility into internal service delivery costs

CGI US GTO also uses Exivity to monitor its own internal resource consumption.

Delivering IT services consumes infrastructure and therefore creates real costs. By tracking these costs against individual service offerings, CGI gained greater visibility into the cost drivers behind service delivery.

This helped GTO identify opportunities for better cost containment, with resulting savings contributing directly to the bottom line.

Additional financial management capabilities

Beyond the core metering and billing workflow, CGI's implementation uses several Exivity capabilities to support ongoing financial management.

Scheduled workflows coordinate data collection and transformation. Budgets and notifications can be configured for individual accounts, while audit trails and logs provide visibility into changes and processing errors.

Rate adjustments can be used to apply service-specific pricing logic such as discounts, while automated billing and chargeback reports provide scheduled summaries of technology spend.

Together, these capabilities allow CGI to move beyond static monthly reporting toward a more dynamic model for managing infrastructure consumption and charges.

From infrastructure consumption to automated billing

CGI's experience demonstrates how on-premises infrastructure billing can evolve beyond manually compiled monthly reports.

By bringing together information from the CMDB, hypervisors, storage, backup, networking, customer records, services, and pricing, Exivity created a structured path from technical consumption to financial reporting.

The result was a system capable of processing approximately 40,000 usage records per day across more than 200 active services, while giving CGI significantly faster visibility into customer and internal consumption.

Instead of waiting until the end of the month, CGI could understand infrastructure usage as early as the following morning—and translate that usage into billing, chargeback, financial reporting, and cost management with substantially less manual effort.