Challenges

When we sat down with Felix from Kuehne + Nagel, he told us that managing large-scale invoicing and robotic process automation (RPA) posed significant challenges for them. The need to pause development just to start a session hindered efficiency. Felix explained: "Sometimes we had to stop a developer just to start a session". Additionally, their workflow required a more flexible and scalable solution to manage thousands of invoices per day, integrate with various tax authorities, and ensure seamless data persistence despite network issues or human interventions.

Solution

While addressing their rigid challenges, the team at Kuehne + Nagel found their answers by stumbling upon the products of OpenIAP. At first they learned about OpenRPA, that allowed them to seamlessly create automation robots. However, when they learned about OpenCore a whole new world of possibilities opened, felix explained: "The queuing (work item queues) concept was a game-changer for us. It allowed us to manage every stage of a document's lifecycle, even across network issues or human errors". For our client the process of structuring automation processes into different states, controlled by a queue ensured not only data persistence but also flexibility. It allowed them to pause workflows, let users interact with the data, and then seamlessly return it to the process---without losing progress or consistency. To sum up, Felix pointed out that OpenCore has now become the backbone of how they handle invoicing: "This is the perfect tool that we need in order to create complex invoicing scenarios. Today it has become the pillar of how we handle invoicing, globally."

Felix highlighted three key reasons why they chose OpenCore as their preferred automation platform:

1. Scalability -- OpenCore's architecture allowed them to handle thousands of invoices per day effortlessly, distributing workloads dynamically across multiple servers. On this, Felix elaborated: "For example, we once had a case where we had to manage thousands of invoices per day. At first, we didn't realize there was a better way, but later we discovered that the process could have been completed in just an hour by distributing the workload across multiple servers". Furthermore, OpenCore's support for pods enabled seamless scaling without increasing hardware capacity.
2. Functional Versatility -- OpenCore's extensive integration capabilities meant they could interface with any tax authority or system across seven different countries. The platform's document management features allowed them to process, convert, sign, and store documents with complete flexibility.
3. Ease of Adoption -- Despite having no prior experience with OpenCore, their developers achieved results within weeks: "We started with two developers who didn't know how to use it. It took us no more than a week or two to get the first results", Felix explained. He also pointed out that the intuitive nature of the platform, combined with its rapid adaptability to emerging technologies like AI, has made it an invaluable tool for him and his team.

Results

The implementation of OpenCore transformed their invoicing operations. The platform became the backbone of their global invoicing system, handling between 20,000 to 40,000 invoices per day with unparalleled efficiency. Felix told us that by standardising reusable integration models with OpenCore, it has significantly accelerated their deployment times: "When we started the first integration, it took us (42 team members) five months and today it takes between four to five weeks to complete a full integration with only eight people working on it".

Beyond scalability, OpenCore dramatically improved resilience. A real-world test of this occurred when one country's tax authority mistakenly blacklisted their IP address. With no manual intervention required, OpenCore automatically resumed operations once access was restored: "As soon as this our IP was approved again by the authority, our OpenCore system started again. Completely automatically. We didn't have to change anything. We didn't have to touch any documents. Everything restarted seamlessly." Collaboration also improved---not just internally, but across affiliates---by systematically reducing recurring errors. Intelligent retries and automated master data correction minimised the burden on operations, creating a smooth, self-restoring system: "Everyone of our team members has seen the effect. There was no need to describe it. They see that suddenly all the errors disappear on their own because you try a document which works with the same master data". Felix elaborated, that this aspect of OpenCore has afforded them complete trust in the software: "From this we have obtained peace of mind which is incredible. Today we have absolutely no doubt about our system: We let it run, it works. It works like a very reliable machine."