Running an expanding global logistics enterprise today means discarding or transforming parts and components that slow down business growth. Access World, a global logistics company which operates in 30-plus countries with over 800 office locations, realised that it required digital transformation in quite a few operational areas, including human resource management. Otherwise, it risked being left behind, undoing its record of continuous corporate successes throughout the years.

During the Oracle CloudWorld Tour in Singapore, Greg Sheen, the Group Chief Information Officer of the end-to-end logistics service provider described some of the recent challenges with its internal operations, and how they turned things around with AI-driven cloud computing solutions.

Replacing legacy systems

Headquartered in Switzerland, Access World does business across five continents, with operations in Canada, United States, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa among others.

In the Asia-Pacific, Access World has had operations since 2002, and it is currently present in China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Malaysia. The company annually handles more than 7 million tons of cargo in the region.  Globally, Access World has more than 1,200 employees and 155 warehouse facilities, and it annually handles 28 million tons of cargo.

“Access World is probably not a name that you would recognise, but it indirectly impacts everyone in the Asia Pacific. If you own a mobile phone, probably a component of that mobile phone has actually gone through our warehouses and logistics processes. We manage everything from ferrous and non-ferrous metals — aluminum, copper, cobalt — that goes into making the batteries in the mobile phones, as well as big batteries for cars,” Sheen explained.

Presently, the company is diversifying into more renewable energy-type of logistics, such as windmills and solar panels, as well as more traditional supply chain logistics such as fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). “We are 92 years old, so we have been around for quite a while, and we have been going through quite a massive transformation over the last couple of years since we diversified or were basically sold off by our parent organisation, Glencore,” the CIO said.

According to Sheen, the company is trying to move away from its legacy IT environment of 132 applications into a more dynamic, real-time portfolio. “We have specialised applications that are only country-specific. Many of them are end-of-life, so they are either end-of-support or past support. That is a double-edged sword for us, and we have to do something quickly,” he said. For example, the company didn’t have a unified HR system across its 30-plus global locations, the CIO noted. “We were basically operating our employee systems on Excel spreadsheets,” he added.

Introducing modern systems

During the first and second phases of Access World’s digital transformation in 2024, the company leveraged Oracle’s Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, a suite of cloud-based applications for managing organisational workforces, from hiring to retirement. The goal was to improve the employee experience and acquire comprehensive analytics for HR data.

“We’ve gone through HCM transformation — core HR talent management, succession, learning, health and safety, incident management — all of those have gone live in six months,” Sheen recalled. Now, Access World is at the tailend of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation, which involves finance and enterprise performance management (EPM) analytics.

“We’re moving into supply chain, procurement, inventory management, and some of the edge solutions from Oracle, like Oracle Transportation Management, or Global Trade Management,” Sheen said. The Access World CIO added that they are currently leveraging about 25% to 30% of Oracle’s application suites, and with the ongoing transformation of its systems, the company plans to go live with core implementation of the new deployments by May 5.

Turbocharging HR operations with Gen AI

Like many enterprises, Access World has also seized upon the possibilities of AI in logistics, and it optimistically views the possibilities of digital transformation in multiple areas using AI. “We were actually the first company in Asia-Pacific to turn on Oracle’s Generative AI. We have deployed eight models across the organisation. I consider myself to be one of the first executives in the region to start interacting with it. It’s exciting from my perspective, so I encourage my colleagues to actively engage with the Generative AI agents,” Sheen said.

Admitting that the technology is quite new for Access World, he added that Access World employees are already seeing some of the benefits of Generative AI in daily tasks, such as email writing. “I think the HR team is going to be rolling that out (Generative AI) for talent management and the incentive and performance sides towards the end of this year so we are going to see it used more and more as time goes on,” he concluded.