100% Compliance in half the time: How Güntner automates business travel compliance with WorkFlex

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🔎 ABOUT GÜNTNER

Industry leader in cooling technology navigating complex, multi-region business travel compliance

Güntner is a global manufacturer of cooling systems and heat exchangers, operating across most parts of the world: Northern and Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Europe, Middle East and Africa. The company runs five production sites worldwide, with its operational headquarters in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany.

The global presence of company's operations means a constant flow of international travel. Sales teams, service technicians, and internal global functions all cross borders regularly, reaching clients and sites across Europe and beyond.

When it comes to business travel, we have a lot of people travelling for sales, for providing services, and we have the internal company travel because we have the global functions here. We need to travel a lot to our sites across the globe.
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– Axel Dreyer, Head of People, Güntner

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🔥 CHALLENGE

Managing business travel compliance across 27 countries - without a 24/7 platform to support it

• ‍No 24/7 compliance coverage: Güntner's previous provider wasn't available around the clock. For service technicians who sometimes get a few hours' notice before a trip, that meant travelling without the proper documentation. "When it came to trips with very short notice, it was rather difficult to get the A1 certificate right in time," Dreyer explains.
• Low completion rates due to process friction: The application forms were long, complex, and unfamiliar to most employees. Rather than work through them, people simply skipped the process. "The application process seems quite complicated. A lot of questions were asked. People were unsure how to answer these questions, and so they rather avoided this administrative burden."
• Decentralised visa management: Without a centralised process, employees travelling to countries like the US or Mexico handled visa applications themselves. With regulations changing constantly across hundreds of destinations, keeping up individually was unrealistic and put both employees and the company at risk.
• Business-critical service risk: For Güntner's service technicians, compliance isn't just a legal formality. When critical cooling systems fail, technicians need to be on-site fast. A compliance problem at the border or client's site doesn't just mean a fine. "The even bigger impact is if people cannot fulfil their duties, if they cannot repair the system and if we cannot address our customer needs as we should," says Dreyer.

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🎉 SOLUTION

Partnering with WorkFlex to automate compliance end to end, across eight risk dimensions

• A1 certificate application processing in minutes: WorkFlex's 24/7 platform means employees can get an application for A1 certificate processed any time, even for same-day trips. Compliance no longer waits for office hours.
• Streamlined employee experience: Master data is pre-loaded in the system. Employees now only need to enter the destination, travel dates, and a few trip-type questions. "The time you spend for this compliance process is reduced by half," says Dreyer.
• Centralised visa processing: Visa applications that were previously handled individually now run through a single platform. Whatever is required in the background is managed by WorkFlex, with regulations updated automatically as countries change their rules.
• Eight-dimension risk coverage: Every trip is assessed across all compliance dimensions, including permanent establishment risk, employment tax, social security, and health requirements. Nothing falls through the gaps.
• Smooth HRIS integration and onboarding: The integration with Güntner's HR system to transfer employee master data ran without issues, and the onboarding process required minimal internal resource. "The entire onboarding process to the platform was very automated, very well structured, very easy to follow. We didn't experience this in the past."

With the WorkFlex platform, for each trip, you can be confident that you have all risks on the screen and that your employees are able to have a safe trip.

– Axel Dreyer, Head of People, Güntner

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🎯 BENEFITS

34% cost savings per trip and hundreds of compliant trips processed

Since introducing WorkFlex, Guntner has seen clear improvements in international business travel compliance handling:

• Significant per-trip cost reduction: Comparing like-for-like, Güntner achieved cost savings of approximately 34% on a single trip basis since switching to WorkFlex.
• More trips, more compliance: Within five months, 300 trips had been processed through the platform across 27 countries. The original estimate was 550 to 600 trips per year. "The number of compliant trips has increased because people are using the platform and applying for A1 certificates where they might have missed in the past," says Dreyer.
• State-of-the-art processes for a mid-sized company: WorkFlex gave Güntner access to compliance infrastructure that previously only larger organisations could afford. "For companies at our size with limited resources, we cannot afford our own department dealing with business travel. It's a really big relief from administrative burden. It's cost efficient, and it's a platform that is really easy to integrate in other systems."
• A responsive product partnership: When a Switzerland-specific request came up mid-implementation, WorkFlex added the relevant field in the system quickly. For Güntner, that responsiveness confirmed the relationship was built to last.

“The time you spend for this compliance process is reduced by half. We have cost savings up to approximately 34% on a single trip basis.”

– Axel Dreyer, Head of People, Güntner