Growing pains solved by centralized content in the cloud

World Kinect has grown and changed tremendously over the years, largely through numerous global acquisitions. Today, the company offers a broad suite of solutions across the energy product spectrum. In addition to World Kinect’s core energy and fuel offerings to customers in the transportation sector, they provide advisory services, sustainability, and renewable energy solutions, as well as supply fulfillment for natural gas and power. 

As CIO Josh McLean describes World Kinect, “At our core, we fuel anything that flies, moves, or floats. But we also have quite a diverse product set, including a sustainability business providing renewable energy solutions, as well energy-management solutions — for example, trip-planning support for private planes.”

World Kinect’s ongoing transformation into a diversified energy and solutions provider company was recently symbolized by a name change from World Fuel Services. “As we’ve grown up as a company, it was time for a change,” McLean explains. The new name reflects a commitment to evolution alongside customers, supporting their core energy requirements while simultaneously meeting their energy transition needs on a unified sustainability journey.

But all that growth and change — and all those acquisitions — create content quandaries. When you onboard new companies with their own pre-existing teams and processes, it’s challenging to integrate all the content that goes into any business: invoices, contracts, marketing docs, meeting notes, and more. Prior to Box, McLean says, “You can imagine the proliferation of data that was everywhere. A key part of our strategy was organizing that data, and we chose Box as our number-one, core, strategic platform for content. It’s been quite successful.”

Content access down from days to seconds

Julio Pereira, Senior IT Director, explains how, under the old content paradigm, there was “too much friction around the data movement, and not enough governance or ability to bring folks to the information — as opposed to bringing the information to the folks.” 

Under that on-prem server model, with content siloed in 70+ server rooms in data centers sprinkled around the world, it would sometimes take days to get files to the people who needed them. 

With Box, file-sharing takes mere seconds, no matter where people are. The Content Cloud grants instant and equitable global access for everyone at World Kinect, a global organization of over 5000 people, serving 150,000 customers and operating in 200 countries and territories. World Kinect now uses Box to enable collaboration throughout multiple offices and among field staff, as well as with outside partners and customers.

Easy mobile access, shorter workflows

The ability to access content in the cloud has been a game-changer for World Kinect, which recently rolled out Box Mobile to all of the company’s drivers in the field. Now, they can automatically upload documents for processing back at the office before they’ve even left a job site. Ultimately, easy mobile upload shortens the workflows and even allows the finance teams to shorten the billing period. 

Integrations between Box and other apps that certain teams use further simplifies and streamlines workflows. For instance, Salesforce and Microsoft are both important tools for World Kinect’s teams. Box has integrations with both, as well as an API for building bespoke apps. Pereira says, “It has really helped define the way we handle documents, which is more about encapsulating the integrations of all of our systems into a centralized, yet scalable and distributed, content platform.”

Security and compliance within a highly regulated industry 

The nature of World Kinect’s global energy business — and the number of government organizations involved — means the baseline of data security is pretty high. Any business working globally has to contend with a lot of different rules and regulations, too. Pereira says, “With different geographies we have different compliance needs to meet. Box allows us to adapt the classifications and regulatory requirements, such as for legal or finance, to manage our content in a better way.”

When migrating content from an acquisition or a modernization initiative, Pereira’s team is able to identify exactly what content exists and only migrate the data that’s actually useful and necessary. While it’s being migrated into the Content Cloud, the team sets up accurate retention policies and document classifications so they can put specific guardrails around information.

Removing tedious work with AI

The content partnership with Box is also very promising for World Kinect in terms of AI, a topic on the minds of most IT leaders. World Kinect has been exploring AI for a while now, and McLean recognizes the importance of well-organized, centralized data (particularly unstructured data, or content). He says, “If you have a rich set of data that’s accessible via APIs, you can really open the doors to a lot of things.”

But privacy and security are equally important factors in the AI race. You can’t just blindly apply AI to private data. He continues, “A lot of why Box is really important for us is the data privacy via permissions. There’s so much choice now with generative AI, but Box is well placed because you inherently have the capability around data privacy. That’s the key — the magic. AI on top of that is an additive.”

There are a lot of potential AI use cases for World Kinect, particularly when it comes to increasing efficiency across financial data such as credits, invoices, and other paperwork.  For instance, AI could help improve how the company provides customer credit, or help the legal department go through contracts to find a particular clause or detail. The technology investment made has given the company efficiency gains in many areas. McLean says, “We believe AI will further this benefit by freeing staff members to focus more on strategic and valuable work.”

A deepening partnership around optimizing content

The partnership between World Kinect and Box has deepened over the years. McLean says, ​​“We partnered with Box to help us secure our data in a highly scalable way that was easily accessible regardless of where you existed in the organization and the globe. But it’s a very well-run company with a phenomenal culture, and we can learn a lot outside the product.”

 

“We operate in over 200 countries and territories with over 5,000 employees, and Box is our single content management platform for the entire organization. ”

— Josh McLean, Chief Information Officer, World Kinect Corporation