DP World
Overview
From ports to platforms: Reimagining the digital gateaway to global trade
From factory floor to customer door, DP World helps businesses keep their supply chains moving across sectors and borders. As a leader in global trade, it wanted its customer-facing digital experiences to reflect the levels of excellence and personalization it strives to deliver across its operations.
Using our service design approach, Horizontal Digital helped DP World shape and deliver a brand-new digital platform built on Sitecore. This has unlocked accelerated innovation, closer worldwide collaboration, and highly personalized customer experiences – all underpinned by centralized governance that ensures brand consistency across its global digital operations.
The Situation
A titan of trade burdened by disjointed digital experiences
When your business connects continents, your digital presence should feel just as connected. Every day, DP World moves an incredible 11% of global trade. Across more than 75 countries, it provides customers large and small with streamlined, end-to-end logistics – whatever their cargo, and whatever their challenge.
150operationsacross 6 continents
103,000employeesfrom 75 countries
11%of world trademoves through DP infrastructure
With more than 50 regional websites, brands, and services, each individually managed, DP World wasn’t achieving the levels of customer and operational excellence it was aiming for.
It turned to its digital experience partner, Horizontal Digital, to deliver one of its most ambitious transformations yet. Our task was to create and launch a unified global digital experience that would enable the business to:
- Innovate at pace, rolling out technologies such as AI across its digital portfolio
- Shift from a brochure-style website to an interactive lead-generation experience
- Achieve visibility of user behavior and engagement across its digital ecosystem
- Offer highly personalized digital customer experiences at global scale
- Maintain brand consistency across its digital portfolio, while still enabling regional flexibility and relevance
- Improve operational efficiency and foster closer collaboration between its regional marketing teams
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The Response
Using a service design approach to transform DP World
Co-designing the digital experience
Success for DP World was dependent on creating genuinely user-centric experiences across its digital portfolio. To achieve this, we adopted a service design approach rooted in collaboration, operating as one team with DP World.
Our engagement began with in-depth, face-to-face sessions with key stakeholders across regions. These workshops helped us understand their current pain points, future ambitions, and operational realities, while building internal team alignment.
With these insights, we began shaping the new global website’s information architecture, regularly validating our direction with DP World teams to ensure we were solving real problems. Content strategy followed suit, with Horizontal’s content designers working side by side with their counterparts at DP World to define a scalable governance and creation model.
Building a future-ready ecosystem
As we firmed up the users’ needs and business requirements, we consulted the DP World team on the right technology solution for them. DP World needed to maintain global brand consistency while empowering individual regions with flexibility—making Sitecore XM Cloud the ideal choice.
Its modular, cloud-based architecture would enable DP World to replace legacy infrastructure across 50+ regional sites, reducing technical debt, and delivering instant scalability. XM Cloud’s composable nature also ensured compatibility with DP World’s broader technology ecosystem for future, seamless API integrations.
To enhance XM Cloud’s core capabilities, we deployed a suite of complementary Sitecore tools:
- Content Hub for centralized asset management, governance, and accelerated publishing
- Search to power AI-enhanced discovery and frictionless information access
- Personalize to enable real-time, behavior-based experience tailoring
Nowadays, expectations are that digital experiences will be seamless, intuitive, and conversational. Moving onto the new platform that Horizontal Digital helped us design and build, has taken us to that level, not just from a technology standpoint, but in how our teams around the world now operate.”
The results
A blueprint for digital experiences in global enterprises
Following successful go-live – which included an internal launch activation at DP World HQ (Opens in a new tab) – the business now has a scalable, intelligent, and future-ready digital platform. It enables innovation and flexibility across global and regional marketing teams, while maintaining centralized governance for a consistent, high-quality brand experience.
Additionally, we’ve been providing proactive managed services for the global platform, so that DP World can maximize on everything the platform has to offer. This includes working strategically to ideate, build, and refine (using integrated platform analytics) new functionality to support its global marketing operations.
The results range from increased lead generation, search visibility, cost savings from less platforms, and operational efficiency. But the rewards haven't stopped there. More results include:
- Highly personalized customer journeys: Users enjoy more tailored experiences, further enhanced with much-improved search and UX design
- Closer marketing team collaboration: Teams around the world are collaboratively feeding into its ongoing development
- More agile regional marketing: Reusable components provide a framework for regional teams to bring new experiences to market faster
- Framework for continuous improvement: Comprehensive analytics to iterate based on user behavior and engagement
50%Reduction in content duplication
30%YoY increase in leads following launch
62%More users on the new DPWorld.com compared to old site
56%Increase in sales pipeline from website contribution
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