When 657 dossiers a month run on manual input, growth becomes your biggest risk.

The challenge

Herfurth has been moving cargo across the globe since 1899. A family-owned freight forwarder rooted in Antwerp, with 250 people in Belgium and the Netherlands, the company built its name on deep ocean freight expertise and customs know-how. Clients value Herfurth for precisely that: specialist knowledge in complex, niche markets and a level of personal service that larger players struggle to match.

But the forwarding industry was digitalizing fast, and margins were tightening. Over decades of growth, Herfurth's operational systems had evolved organically. Shipment data moved through multiple disconnected systems, requiring repeated manual entry across workflows. The technology underpinning daily operations was becoming harder to maintain and to find specialist knowledge for. What had always worked was starting to limit what came next.

For Herfurth, the ambition to grow made one thing clear: scaling by adding headcount alone was not sustainable. Before any modernization could begin, leadership needed a shared picture of where the organization was heading and how technology should support that direction.

The solution

Herfurth came looking for automation. What emerged was a broader question: without a shared vision, a mapped set of capabilities and an architecture that could support scale, automating individual processes would only cement the existing complexity.

So the work started at the top. We helped build a shared vision and strategy that brought together the perspectives of both the group leadership and the logistics organization. From there, the team mapped Herfurth's capabilities against what the future operating model required. Rather than analyzing processes or systems in isolation, the focus was on the underlying capabilities the organization needs to perform at scale. This made it possible to identify priority domains for transformation, connect strategic ambition directly to execution, and propose adjustments to the organizational structure to support the transformation ahead. A financial model laid out the total cost of ownership across a phased five-year horizon, giving leadership a clear view on investment, risk, and expected value at each stage.

With the strategic foundation in place, we designed a scalable IT architecture with an API layer at its core. This replaced tightly coupled legacy integrations with a modular structure that enables gradual modernization without disrupting ongoing operations. The phased roadmap was deliberately built to let Herfurth evaluate each step before committing to the next, so the transformation could adapt as the market shifted.

The expected result: a 90% reduction in manual steps for dossier creation and management. And, more importantly, an operations team freed to spend their time on what Herfurth is known for: specialist logistics advice in the markets where precision matters most.

The approach

The engagement ran for four months, with a compact team combining strategy, business analysis, and software engineering. Weekly sessions with the CEO kept the work grounded in operational reality. At the end of each phase, we presented findings and recommendations to the full leadership group across operations, IT, and group level.

Each phase was designed to deliver standalone value. The first created alignment across leadership. The second clarified priorities through a capability map and made trade-offs explicit. The third made the technical path concrete with a scalable architecture. Because results were visible at every stage, Herfurth expanded the scope twice during the engagement, adding vision work and organizational design that were not part of the original brief.

What made the approach distinctive was the composition of the team. We combined a business strategist and a software engineer from day one. Every strategic decision was validated against technical feasibility in the same conversation. No handover between strategy and implementation. No months of architecture on paper before someone checks whether it can be built. That close loop between business thinking and technical reality is what made the recommendations land.