Ahlers is a family business with more than 115 years of experience, headquartered in Antwerp, with offices in more than fifteen countries and over 220 employees worldwide. The organization combines global scale with local expertise in maritime services and logistics.

Ahlers' system landscape was highly fragmented. The order-to-cash flow ran across several local systems, with no central view of costs and margins.

Three triggers led Ahlers to a central digitalization investment. Customers were placing ever-higher demands on service integration and data reporting, demands the existing IT structure could no longer handle. IT had historically been managed partly per country, while the business was calling for central control. And the war in Ukraine forced a carve-out of the Russian branch, which at the time held a large share of the IT expertise.

Ahlers opted for a best-of-breed central architecture, with clear roles for the classic silo systems CRM, TMS, WMS, Finance and HR, and an Order Management System on Mendix as the hub connecting them. An integration layer links the systems together.

To fill the IT gaps, Ahlers ran a selection process lasting several months, weighing Mendix against Salesforce and high-code alternatives. The choice fell on Mendix because of its leadership position in the Gartner quadrant, an attractive business case, a predictable OPEX model, and the stability a European vendor offers in a geopolitically uncertain climate. Xylos delivered the project.

A discovery workshop mapped out the business needs, the value drivers and the end-to-end flow: order intake, cost transparency, real-time margin management, milestone-based invoicing and document generation. Ahlers deliberately started with document generation, where the biggest operational gain lay. The project works with two-week sprints and a living backlog. Within just six weeks, a first version could already be shown to stakeholders at Ahlers.

The Mendix platform automates the entire order-to-cash flow. Orders are entered with cost and revenue lines per business unit, and incoming invoices are matched against the cost lines, automatically where possible and manually where needed.

Invoices arrive through an integration layer. Peppol invoices pass straight through, while other invoices are scanned via OCR and AI with an extra validation step. The platform generates logistics documents automatically and uniformly, manages margins per order and per shipment in real time, and invoices against agreed milestones.

Automated anomaly detection flags deviations, such as a high margin on low revenue or unusually high costs. The multilingual interface follows Ahlers' international operations.

After nine months, the platform delivers measurable results. AI-driven invoice processing has cut processing time to twenty seconds per invoice, compared with five minutes of manual work in the old system, with data accuracy at 98 percent where it used to be 60 percent.

• 3,500 supplier invoices scanned by AI, of which 3,231 automatically matched to the cost lines.

• More than 6,511 documents generated automatically, resulting in less manual work.

• 2,067 order files serving as a global single source of truth, so every cost is accounted for.

• 1,549 sales invoices with worldwide transparency, lowering DSO and simplifying follow-up from head office.

Worldwide transparency over sales invoices and supplier costs lets Ahlers track the entire process, order by order, and steer procurement more sharply thanks to real-time data insights. The platform forms the basis for the next steps: full order-to-cash automation, a reworked interface and a self-service environment for customers, all three currently in implementation.

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