Solving veterinary healthcare challenges in innovative ways

If you have a pet, chances are you’ve benefited from the work of IDEXX Laboratories in one way or another. After all, this life sciences organization creates diagnostics to help ensure the health and wellbeing of companion animals around the world. IDEXX also develops cutting-edge products and services for livestock, poultry, water testing, and dairy markets. And they run the software that grants access to a pet record or books your next appointment.

With more than 10,000 employees in over 175 countries, IDEXX runs a global network of reference laboratories to process lab work. It’s a global S&P 500 business that hasn’t lost its entrepreneurial spirit. But, as Ken Grady, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at IDEXX, quips, “Innovation for the sake of innovation is useless. It’s got to be innovation with application.”

For this reason, Box has become a valuable partner for IDEXX over the years. Initially, Grady’s team partnered with Box to replace the company’s legacy enterprise content management (ECM) system. But what Box provides today is ICM: Intelligent Content Management. This paradigm shift enables IDEXX to take maximum advantage of all its unstructured data, tap into GenAI, and power intelligent workflows that increase the speed of innovation across the company.

The content foundation for innovation

Like many established organizations, IDEXX once stored content on premises. With different teams using different file systems and file-sharing methods, it became progressively difficult for the entire organization to collaborate seamlessly across lines of business. “As a growth organization,” says Grady, “Our content wasn’t growing linearly. It was growing exponentially, and it was all over the place. It became clear to us that our content strategy had to change.”

The cloud solution they chose needed to ensure seamless user adoption. Alan Boucher, the Senior Director in IT for Enterprise Architecture and AI, elaborates: “One of the things that’s really critical to a content management platform is the ability to jump right in and use it. It should be natural.”

Box provided that ease of use, enabling swift collaboration among project stakeholders. Integrations with Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and other commonly used tools enabled employees to work in familiar ways, so the transition was seamless. With built-in Box security and Box Shield, IDEXX trusts that all content is secure and compliant, and Box Shield grants an extra level of enterprise-grade security, with the ability to classify content and apply specific security controls where they’re needed. Grady says, “This level of security gives us peace of mind, knowing that our sensitive information is protected.”

Convenient collaboration with secure content

Security is important, but it can’t hinder actual work. IDEXX team members can share files via shared links —a secure way to collaborate both within the company and with external partners. Content (which might range from valuable IP in the form of new product ideas to the personal information of employees or sensitive sales contracts) always has the right level of security.

For instance, on Box Drive, an employee can easily search and bring up a standard operating procedure (SOP) for a project with a reference laboratory or a design document for an engineering project team. But that access relies upon permissions, and IT can control who has those permissions on a broad or granular scale.

IDEXX also uses Box Relay to institute robust workflow capabilities, and can trust that all content is managed securely within those collaborative workflows. IT has full transparency into who is opening and editing files within workflows. Grady says, “Every kind of company today, especially in a remote environment where employees are spread out, needs that kind of baseline secure content-sharing platform. Box is a support platform for our overall collaboration, and gives us the confidence to answer questions around security, data privacy, et cetera, as needed, in the markets we operate in.”

The evolution from ECM to ICM

IDEXX is no stranger to AI. Many of their diagnostic products already use it. But with the emergence of GenAI, there’s a lot of potential for teams to improve the ways they work —not just software engineers and L&D teams but people in procurement, sales, marketing, HR, and more.

For this reason, Box has become much more to IDEXX than content management and workflow automation. With solutions like Box AI and Box Hubs, teams can power greater impact across all their content workflows. Hubs, for instance, enables IDEXX teams to spin up quick content portals for particular projects or initiatives, then apply Box AI to those curated content sets. As Boucher describes, “Teams using Hubs can interrogate their documents in a number of ways — and much more intelligently.” A few more examples:

• Sales teams can quickly search through contracts from a particular region
• Reference labs can look up variations on an SOP to look at a clause across revisions
• An IT team can summarize a technical document around a cybersecurity vulnerability

The flexibility of Hubs is important to Boucher: “I can create a Hub for an engineering team to share documents, then bring product teams into it. This shows tremendous promise for us beyond the traditional folder structure of content management.”

The Box AI API will extend that promise even further for IDEXX, allowing them to build their own platforms leveraging Box AI and create orchestrations across them to drive more efficiency and productivity. “That’s really going to drive value,” says Boucher. “We’re excited about Hubs and the concept of Intelligent Content Management in general.”

Security within GenAI: The critical piece

A high level of content security has been important to IDEXX all along, but with the advent of GenAI, it has become even more critical. The Box AI API enables Grady’s team to “bring the model to the data, where we can actually provide secure controls. We can leverage our already structured Box permissions and privacy to safely and confidently bring GenAI directly to the enterprise content that we have.”

Making Box AI accessible to the workforce at IDEXX also cuts down on the use of “shadow AI” tools that employees could use simply by logging into any browser, but which could jeopardize data privacy and content security.

With Intelligent Content Management, IDEXX has visibility into its unstructured data, ease of content management, and better protection for all the information in the enterprise, even as teams experiment with GenAI. Grady says, “What I appreciate about Box AI, whether you’re using it for a meeting note or trying to analyze a long document or maybe put together an agenda, is that Box provides security. You only have access to the information that’s inherited from your Box permissions.”

Box and IDEXX in partnership

As the company continues to innovate in its use of content and, in particular, AI, Box will continue to be a valuable resource for Grady’s team. With the periodic help of Box Consulting, Grady says, “We have great support and a strategic partnership with the Box team. Box understood where they could help us accelerate and what was really of value. It truly is a partnership — not just another vendor relationship.”

IDEXX will always be an innovation-driven company, and having partners that continually innovate their own products serves them well. For this reason, Grady confirms, “Box is the partner we chose to trust with our Intelligent Content Management strategy. As we look to the future, we’re excited to see what Box can bring to us. The platform’s amazing capabilities, innovation, and strong security position us well for the future.”

The top three things IDEXX loves about Box, according to Grady:

1. Simplicity: “I love the ease of use. The change management effort to get people to use Box is a pull, not a push.”
2. Ease of use: “We get really great feedback on the usability of Box.”
3. AI capabilities: “Box AI allows us to unlock more from our content, query it, update metadata more quickly, protect it, and understand who has access and how long they should have access.”

We’re excited about Intelligent Content Management. The visibility, the transparency, the management, the protection of critical information for our enterprise is how we’re going to continue to grow.