DHL invoices land in NetSuite as freight bills — end to end, unattended

1The problem

• Staff logged into the DHL carrier portal by hand, searched invoices within a target date range, and downloaded the invoice CSV plus justification archives — every cycle, every time.
• The same numbers were then re-entered into NetSuite to create freight cost bills — identical data handled twice, in two systems.
• Nothing tied the portal and the ERP together: no shared log, no clean handoff, no single place to see what had already been processed.
• Failures — a refused login, an empty search, a missing document — surfaced late and informally, whenever someone noticed.
• And the estate is macOS on Apple Silicon — not the Windows environment most RPA tooling is built for, so everything from robot installation to browser automation had to work outside the usual comfort zone.

2What we did

1. 1An unattended robot starts every 15 minutes and reads the target date range from a text file in the shared input folder — the team controls scope simply by dropping a file in.
2. 2It logs into the DHL portal, searches invoices within the range, and downloads the invoice-detail CSV and the justification archive.
3. 3Processed inputs move to a Complete folder and outputs land in a defined Output folder — the handoff is unambiguous, and nothing gets processed twice.
4. 4On the NetSuite side, a scheduled SuiteScript job imports the CSV as freight cost bills — the ERP is updated through its own import mechanism, not through screen scraping.
5. 5The robot then verifies the import results, catching errors and partial failures instead of assuming success.
6. 6Exception paths cover DHL login failures, empty result ranges, download failures, missing documents inside the archive, and NetSuite import failures.
7. 7Every run closes with an emailed summary log; failures escalate by email — nothing dies silently.
8. 8The whole flow was built for the client's macOS estate — the robot runs on Apple Silicon Macs, automating the portal and folder handoffs natively instead of forcing a Windows box into a Mac-only environment.

3Inside the Platform