Customer Reference Story
The Humbert Group is moving into the future with easy
about Humbert
The Humbert Group is active in the waste disposal, transport and construction business. The family-owned company employs around 80 people at four locations in Dorsten, North Rhine-Westphalia. The group comprises four companies that offer a wide range of services, from renting out special vehicles for the construction industry to transporting and disposing of building materials and processing construction sludge. Microsoft Dynamics NAVISION is used as the ERP system in most companies and is currently being migrated to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Digitalization means looking ahead
Tradition meets innovation: This slogan perfectly describes the Humbert Group in Wulfen, Germany. The family-run company is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2025.
Over the years, a small haulage company with a team of horses has developed into a diversified business with several locations and a highly diversified product portfolio in the waste disposal business. Whether it’s excavation work, the transport, disposal and recycling of building materials or the rental of transport silos – Humbert has the right solution. This wide range of services is not only appreciated in the region. The company’s customer base extends throughout Germany and neighboring countries.
Behind the success is the Humbert family, which is now in its third generation of managing the company. An important driving force behind this success is the integration of technological advances into business processes. As early as 2009, photovoltaic systems were installed at all locations and a large part of the fleet and numerous construction machines were converted from fossil fuels to electric drives. In this environment, it is no wonder that Humbert was quick to rely on future-oriented solutions from easy for digitalization.
Early switch to electronic archiving
As early as the late 1990s, Humbert’s administration was looking into the advantages of the paperless office. An external IT consultant recommended easy archive, which was introduced at the company in 1998:
“We started by archiving our employees’ daily reports, which are still created and stored in easy archive today.”
This is reported by Ludger Giese, commercial director and authorized signatory at Humbert. In his 30 years of service, he has played a key role in digitalization in a managerial position:
“The next step was the electronic archiving of incoming invoices with attachments and delivery notes with the introduction of easy invoice. Today, we also store newspaper articles and other documents that are of interest to the company there.”
Giese remembers that integrating an electronic archiving system into the IT system posed a number of technical challenges, especially in the early years. But he wouldn’t have it any other way:
“For me, the biggest advantage of easy archive is the simple search function. If you are looking for documents from the last 10 or 20 years, you can see the results immediately on the screen and no longer have to run down to the basement or search through folders for the relevant documents. That’s the biggest advantage for me.”
easy invoice makes it easier to grow the company
The second project after easy archive was the conversion of incoming invoice processing to easy invoice at the end of the 2010s. The decisive factor here was the constant growth of the company. From the 2000s onwards, the Humbert Group expanded rapidly:
the newly founded subsidiaries were located at different sites in Dorsten, which made processing incoming invoices increasingly complicated. Although Humbert’s accounting department remained at the company headquarters, the auditors for the invoices were now spread across the various locations:
“That was the deciding point at which we said something had to be done. We didn’t want to copy the invoices and then send them back and forth with couriers or, in the worst case, by post within the company.”
Since the easy archive had already proven itself in operation for years, it was not a long way to a digital solution for processing incoming invoices from easy. So easy invoice was finally set up on the company server in collaboration with an easy solution partner, Systec 2.0 GmbH. The program runs – like the Microsoft Dynamics NAVISION ERP system – as an on-premises installation on a private cloud that Humbert obtains as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). In addition, the Capture Verify and Capture Mail modules were installed with easy invoice. They enable the automated capture and verification of invoices that are fed into the invoice workflow as a scan from a paper template or by e-mail.
Thirty percent of invoices are still on paper
After the implementation of easy invoice, the simplified approval processes had an immediate positive effect. Now, all invoices can be signed with a single click in the software from easy, regardless of location. Giese also values the fact that all processes associated with the processing of incoming invoices are now much simpler, faster and more transparent overall. It is important to note that Humbert still receives a large number of paper invoices:
“We receive around 11,000 to 12,000 invoices a year, about 30 percent of which are still on paper. This is because we have many small businesses such as landscape gardeners or janitorial services as customers.”
These invoices are now scanned and, thanks to easy Capture Verify, can be fed into the system in fully digitalized form.
Giese recalls that when the switch to the digital workflow was first made, the system occasionally froze:
“At first, employees were confronted with a mass of digital data that had to be processed. That’s why we had a transition phase in which the invoices had to be sorted manually on the screen – not in paper form. But I think a transition phase like that happens everywhere, and we had it too.”
The more the processes settled in over time, the smoother it became to work with the software:
“At one point, everyone involved realized that the new digital system is much better than the old one.”
Digitalization must be handled cleverly
For the experienced authorized signatory, a digitalization project of this kind requires clever management:
“In my view, it is important to take employees with you from the very first minute and to involve them in the transformation process. I asked my people every step of the way: How do you see this and what mistakes might the new system make?”
In doing so, it is also important for Giese to allow a certain amount of healthy skepticism among employees. This approach worked very well at Humbert, so that today all employees are fully convinced by the digital solution.
Another advantage of digitalizing incoming invoice processing with easy invoice is noticeable at Humbert at the beginning of the new year. Just in time for the end of the year, Giese and easy solution partner Systec 2.0 GmbH made the system fit for processing the new electronic invoice formats XRechnung and ZUGFeRD. Since the beginning of the year, a large proportion of invoices have been fed into the workflow as a verified electronic set of structured data.
we already transfer the bank data today and post it automatically in our system. in this way, for example, double entries for incoming invoices are already recognized. but i hope that this entire process can be further improved in the future, for example with ai.
Ludger Giese,
Commercial Manager & Authorized Signatory, Humbert Group