Strategic advice and technical delivery under one roof. We help you decide what needs to happen and in what order, then build alongside you. No lengthy reports that end up in a drawer: a roadmap you can recognise in working software.
Digital consulting at Appfront is not a separate advisory division that hands you over to an implementation partner after a few PowerPoint slides. The people who discuss strategy, architecture and roadmap are the same people who go on to deliver the software. That keeps our advice honest, since we won't recommend anything we can't deliver ourselves, and it keeps delivery sharp, because the team understands the context from the start.
We are a Dutch build partner with consultancy DNA. Not the Big Four route with large teams, lengthy reporting cycles and a price tag only multinationals can carry. Instead, we are pragmatic, suited to the mid-market, and offer a roadmap calibrated to your reality rather than a generic transformation template.
Digital consulting at our firm is an umbrella over more specific engagements. Under that umbrella sit, among others, IT modernisation advice for those who want to review their application portfolio, platform modernisation for those who need to renew a specific system, and enterprise AI implementation for those who want to embed AI within the organisation. Which specialist route fits often only becomes clear during the first few workshops. That is why many clients start with a broad digital consulting engagement and specialise along the way.
Digital consulting is a broad term, and rightly so, because the problem is broad. We divide it into six areas of work, which feature in every engagement in different proportions.
An objective assessment of where your organisation stands: application portfolio, data maturity, integration level, security readiness and your teams' ability to adapt. Without a maturity picture, any roadmap is guesswork.
Translating your business goals into a digital agenda: which initiatives, in what order, with which dependencies, and which will wait or not proceed at all. A roadmap you recognise in your quarterly review, not just in a report.
Build or buy, cloud or hybrid, monolith or microservices, which vendor fits. We lay out the trade-offs explicitly, with pros and cons, rather than a disguised sales pitch for a platform we happen to partner with.
Strategy without execution remains theory. We guide delivery, whether as the building partner, as programme manager, or in combination with your own teams. This keeps our advice honest: we won't recommend anything we can't deliver ourselves.
A transformation stands or falls with the people who must work with it. We help with communication, training and the set-up of governance, not as a separate HR track but embedded in the delivery work where it has an effect.
On larger engagements, alongside substantive advice, steering is also needed: planning, stakeholder management, escalation paths and progress reporting. We also offer this as a standalone role if you retain substantive direction yourself.
This depends on where your organisation stands and which decision you have in front of you. We determine together which form fits during the first conversation. Engagements often start small and grow over time.
A structured scan of your current digital landscape: application portfolio, data architecture, integrations, security and organisational readiness. At the end you have an objective picture plus a prioritised list, not an 80-page report, but concrete next steps your team can act on tomorrow.
You know something has to change — a platform migration, an AI strategy, a post-merger IT integration — but not what should come first, what it will deliver or what the risks are. Through workshops we work towards a phased roadmap with well-founded choices on vendor, architecture and sourcing. Including a business case, not just a tech talk.
Strategy without execution remains theory. In this engagement we guide not only the decision but also its delivery — as the building partner, as programme manager, or as an interim role alongside your own team. We stay on board until it works in production and your organisation can carry it forward independently.
The Dutch consultancy market roughly falls into three segments. At the top: Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC and Accenture — strong methodologies, large teams, high rates. In the middle: specialist advisory firms that advise excellently but don't build themselves. At the bottom: freelancers and small agencies that do build but rarely have the organisational depth for a transformation. We sit in between — a builders' firm with a strategic backbone, geared to mid-market clients in the Netherlands.
In practice this means we work with a small, experienced team. No pyramid of juniors doing the real work under the supervision of a senior. The people sitting at the table with you also do the analysis, write the decision documents and — if you wish — help build the implementation. Short lines, no handovers, no lost context between advice and delivery. That is half the reason why our AI consultancy and our interim tech lead role work the way they do.
We are also honest about what we are not. For an organisation with 50,000 employees and worldwide offices, we are not the right fit — that is where Accenture or an equivalent firm belongs. For an engagement where a McKinsey stamp on the report is politically essential, we are not that either. We are, however, the right fit if you are an organisation of roughly 100 to a few thousand employees, with a serious digital agenda and a board that would rather see results in software than in PowerPoint.
No vague deliverables, but artefacts your board, your IT team and your business colleagues can actually use tomorrow.
Four situations in which clients call us. If you recognise one, we'd be glad to talk further — no obligation, half an hour is enough to see whether the fit is right.
You have just been appointed, or the board has given you a mandate to accelerate the digital agenda. You are looking for a sparring partner who can keep up with the pace, whom you can trust at both strategic and technical level, and who won't arrive after a quarter with a report. Our role is often a mix of adviser and hands-on build partner, depending on where the gaps lie within your own organisation.
There is budget, there are ambitions, but there is no clear prioritisation. AI, data foundations, customer portals, ERP modernisation, security investments: doing everything at once is not an option, and it is unclear which interdependencies are at play. You need an independent voice to set the order and make the trade-offs clear to the board.
You are bigger than a start-up but smaller than a corporate. The Big Four firms are too heavy and too expensive for your scale, while a freelancer is too light for the breadth of what you need. You are looking for a partner who thinks along with your budget, understands the business reality of a mid-sized organisation, and doesn't try to squeeze you into an enterprise mould that doesn't fit.
After an acquisition or merger, two landscapes sit side by side, sometimes three or more. Which systems stay, which go, how do you migrate without bringing the business to a standstill, and how do you keep people on board along the way? That is not just an advisory question; it is above all an execution question, where advice and delivery continually feed each other.
An industry association or trade body wants to guide its members through digitalisation, with a shared foundation, a sector-specific roadmap or a shared service. We have experience with this kind of multi-client engagement and can switch between the collective interest and the individual member organisation.
You are considering a large SaaS package or a custom build, for example a new enterprise platform, a customer portal or a data platform. Before you make the decision, you want an independent analysis that shows the real costs over the lifetime, not just the year-one licence price.
An initial conversation in which we understand where you stand, what problem lies behind the question and which decision is on the table. This is followed by a short proposal phase in which we agree which form (audit, roadmap or guided implementation) suits best.
We speak with key people in your organisation: management, IT, end users and, where relevant, suppliers. We review the existing architecture, processes and data, not to know everything, but to ask the right questions.
In a few focused sessions we lay out the options, make the trade-offs explicit and arrive at well-founded choices. No black-box analysis: your team makes the decisions together with us and retains ownership.
We translate the choices into a phased plan with sequencing, team deployment and investment. Concrete enough to take to the board, flexible enough to adjust as understanding evolves.
If you wish, we stay on board for delivery, as a build partner, programme manager or interim tech lead. That way advice and execution are carried by the same people, and the engagement only ends once it works in production.
What clients usually ask us before we start: honest answers, no sales talk.
A thirty-minute introductory call, no obligation and no sales pressure. We listen to your situation, ask questions and offer direction you can actually use, even if it turns out that working with us is not the right next step.
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