1 March 2019, Bergstrang 105, Ibbenbüren. Thimo Buchheister and Thorsten Brügge signed the paperwork on ThreeB IT GmbH (Amtsgericht Steinfurt HRB 12324) with one clear mission: help logistics companies stop drowning in paper.
The premise
We'd both spent the previous decade on the same conversation. A regional carrier or a 3PL would invite us in to look at "the customs system" — and we'd find a process that ran on:
- A 2002 client/server application that no current employee had ever met the original developer of.
- An Excel sheet emailed nightly between three teams.
- A fax machine that had to stay because one customer in Antwerp still preferred it.
The point of ThreeB IT was to be the company that both built the modern replacement and operated the boring infrastructure it ran on. The two were the same job. Splitting them — we'll build it, your IT team will run it — was how most of those legacy systems had got into the state they were in.
What we said yes to first
Our first customer projects clustered around the obvious wins:
- Replacing paper customs and shipping documents with PDF generation pipelines that knew what a German Lieferschein and an international CMR look like — and could ship both from the same .NET service.
- Pulling routing and tracking data out of carrier portals so dispatchers stopped re-typing it. That work later became one of the first projects we shipped on top of
IronWebScraper. - Cleaning up the Microsoft 365 tenant the operations side ran on — because once you've built the new customs platform you don't want it sitting next to a 2017-era tenant that nobody's audited since.
That third bullet is the one most software houses skip. We didn't. It's why our four service pillars (IT Services, Software Development, Web Services, Cloud Management) were already in the original pitch deck, not a 2021 retrofit.
The stack we picked, and stuck with
.NET. Azure. Microsoft 365. From day one. Not because Java or Python were wrong choices, but because depth in one ecosystem out-performs surface knowledge of five — and because the logistics customers we wanted were already running Windows estates, Outlook calendars, and Server 2016 boxes.
That bet has shaped everything since: the Kühne+Nagel projects we'd take on a couple of years later, the SaaS products (Xircuit, Outastory, Postnomic), and the customer IT we now operate as a managed service.
We've got more chapters of this story to tell — the Copernicus Hackathon win, the .NET Conf sponsorships, the nationwide COVID testing platform that landed unexpectedly in 2020, the EU Business News recognition in 2025. They all start here.
This is Day 1.