Its greatest success is the market-leading WinSped Transport Management System (TMS), the first version of which was released in 1997 and is still used by over 1,000 customers at around 1,200 locations across Europe. Wagner has now handed over the operational business to his son Magnus Wagner and Rolf Hansmann.

"Our aim has always been to offer our customers added value with new ideas. We have been proving this for 40 years now," says Hilmar Wagner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of LIS Logistische Informationssysteme AG. The technology-enthusiastic business economist can look back on an eventful life story: in 1980, together with Dr. Reinhard Liedl, he founded the predecessor company of today's LIS AG and began programming scheduling software on behalf of a Münster-based freight forwarder. Just four years later, his revolutionary ideas made it possible to process transport orders on the computer for the first time.

However, when the financial backers withdrew and the project threatened to fail, he quickly acquired the rights to the software and ambitiously developed it further on his own: "We had already developed so much passion for the program that we didn't want to give up," says Wagner. A sales partnership with the US tech giant IBM and the growing demand for personal computers gave his vision the jump-start it needed. "Suddenly the market for the corresponding software was there," explains the founder.

Wagner not only won over new customers, but also launched the first standardized programs on the market in the 1980s. At the same time, the company was renamed LIS Wagner & Partner GmbH and other creative minds such as Volker Lückemeier and Volker von Lojewski joined the company, who were to play a decisive role in shaping LIS in the following years as a member of the Management Board and Chairman of the Supervisory Board respectively. "The two were not only reliable business partners, but also long-standing friends. Unfortunately, they will not live to see the 40th anniversary of our company," regrets Wagner.

At the beginning of the new decade - in 1990 - the company created Spedia, an industry solution that could be used on network-compatible computers for the first time. The company's biggest coup, however, came three years after moving to its current location in Greven, with the first version of Spedia's successor WinSped in 1997. Thanks to the establishment of Windows as the operating system, the modular and multilingual program quickly developed into a transport management system and is now used throughout Europe. In the same year, the company changed its name to LIS Logistische Informationssysteme AG.

To date, the range of applications for the software has continued to grow. "Our company has proven to be just as adaptable as our software," says Wagner. He has now handed over the operational business completely to his son Magnus Wagner, who manages the company together with his fellow board member Rolf Hansmann. However, Hilmar Wagner will continue to be available to his company as Chairman of the Supervisory Board. "As a family business, it is important to us that we look to the future together and that our decisions continuously follow a common thread," says Wagner, explaining the generational change that took place in May 2020.