XPO Logistics Eliminates FTP with Biscom SFT

XPO Logistics is a $4.7 billion freight transportation and logistics company consisting of three operating companies: XPO Logistics Freight, XPO Logistics Truckload, and Menlo Worldwide Logistics. Freight provides local, regional, and transcontinental less-than-truckload transportation services. Menlo Worldwide Logistics designs, implements, and manages supply chain solutions. XPO Logistics Truckload provides a network of full truckload services across the US and Canada. The company has 500 locations in 17 countries and approximately 30,000 employees.

Increasing Email Attachment Limits to Accommodate Employees

The IT department at XPO Logistics found that their email attachment file size limits had to keep being increased to accommodate the business need of sending and receiving increasingly large files both internally and with customers.

The default limit was 2MB, later increased to 3MB and finally 5MB, as users’ file attachment needs grew in size. For some users, however, even 5MB was not sufficient. Although they use an Outlook add-in to compress their attachments, files like presentation slides, digital images, and contract documents hundreds of pages long could still be well over the 5MB limit.

“We do have a public FTP site but FTP is not intuitive and is difficult to use for most of the user community,” said Scott Bueffel. “In addition, it requires administrative involvement to create accounts as a way of providing the exchange of files.”

The department staff chose to increase the message size limit up to 20MB for those who needed more space, as an FTP replacement. This increase, however, was still not sufficient for some employees’ needs. Employees who needed to send files larger than 20MB were asked to do so using a Web server. The IT department would manually create a directory on the Web server, and email a link to the sender in order to access the file. This implementation was not only time-consuming, but it also did not ensure that the data was secured or received.

XPO Logistics Eliminates Large Email Attachments 

XPO Logistics resolved their email attachment limit problem by using Biscom SFT as an FTP replacement and alternative to email to send and share large files. SFT is a clientless, Web-based secure file transfer solution that enables enterprise-class large file transfer. Data transfer is secure, authenticated, and delivered directly from point to point. Integrated tracking and reporting capabilities provide a comprehensive audit trail.

XPO Logistics piloted SFT by notifying the more than 750 employees who had non-default message size limits with instructions on how to use Biscom Secure File Transfer as an FTP replacement. The product was so easy to use that employees began using it immediately. In the first thirty days of usage alone, more than one hundred files were sent.

The pilot of SFT was so successful that Scott Beuffel implemented the product company-wide, “our goal is to decrease send limits for those people who we’ve given exceptions in the past, to get everyone’s email attachment limit back to 5MB. Going forward, those  who want to send files larger than 5MB will not have an expanded message size limit, but they will get instructions on how to use SFT instead.”