The systems that ran Herfurth's daily operations were starting to cap its ambition.
Herfurth has been moving cargo across the globe since 1899. With 250 people in Belgium and the Netherlands and a reputation built on ocean freight expertise and customs know-how, they are a full-service freight forwarder rooted in Antwerp. Continued growth brought a familiar challenge: the ambition of the business was outgrowing the systems built to support it.
The challenge
Herfurth's reputation rests on something hard to systematize: deep knowledge of complex, niche markets, and a level of personal service the big forwarders can't match. That judgment is exactly what clients pay for.
But the industry was digitalizing fast, and margins were getting thinner. Herfurth's operations had grown organically over decades, and it showed. Every one of the 657 dossiers a month moved through a string of disconnected systems, with the same data keyed in by hand at each step. Each new hire added capacity. It also added cost to a model that was already stretched. Growing by headcount alone had quietly stopped being an option.
Underneath the process problem sat a quieter one. The knowledge of how the systems fit together, and why they worked the way they did, lived in the heads of a few people. As that expertise moved toward retirement, the risk wasn't just slower work. It was continuity.
So before anyone automated anything, leadership needed something they didn't have yet: a shared view of where the business was going, and an honest read on what it would take in people and systems to get there.
The solution
Herfurth came looking for automation. The bigger question showed up fast: automate processes on top of a tangled foundation, and all you do is make the tangle permanent.
So the work started at the top. We built a shared vision and strategy with group leadership and the logistics organization in the same room, then mapped Herfurth's capabilities against what the future operating model would actually demand. Not the processes, not the systems in isolation, but the capabilities the business needs to run at scale. That mapping is what made it possible to name the priority domains for transformation, tie the strategic ambition to real execution, and recommend the organizational changes to support it.
Next to that sat a five-year business case. The investment wasn't pitched as one big ask. It was structured as a sequence of gated tranches, each carrying its own expected value, each one released only when the previous gate is cleared. Leadership sees what each stage costs and what it returns, and exactly where the risk sits, with a payback that lands inside the five years. Nobody has to bet the whole program on day one.
With that foundation set, we designed a scalable IT architecture built around an API layer. It replaces the tightly coupled legacy integrations with a modular structure that lets modernization happen gradually, AI-enabled automation included further down the roadmap, without breaking live operations.
What does that buy Herfurth? The modeling points to as much as a 90% reduction in the manual steps behind dossier creation and management. It's the kind of shift that hands an operations team its time back, to spend on what Herfurth is actually known for: specialist advice in the markets where precision matters.
The approach
The engagement ran four months. Small team: strategy, business analysis, and software engineering, working together rather than in sequence. Weekly sessions with the CEO kept it honest about how the business actually runs, and at the end of every phase we put our findings in front of the full leadership group across operations, IT, and group level.
Each phase had to stand on its own. The first produced the shared vision and strategy and got leadership aligned on direction. The second delivered a capability map that ranked the domains for transformation and put the trade-offs, organizational changes included, on the table. The third turned all of it into a concrete technical path: the API-centric architecture and the five-year business case to fund it.
Because there was something real to show at every stage, Herfurth widened the scope twice mid-engagement, adding vision and organizational design that were never in the original brief.
The thing that made it work was who sat in the room. A business strategist and a software engineer, paired from day one. Every strategic call got tested against what could actually be built, in the same conversation, not handed over months later to discover half of it doesn't survive contact with engineering. That short loop between business intent and technical reality is why the recommendations held.
A sharp but pragmatic approach gave us clear insights in our IT landscape, systems and processes. Sometimes it was striking to get confronted with our weak spots, but that is often the most reliable catalyst for growth.
