At the intersection of finance and tech: Meet our award-winning finance systems team (pt. 1)

In July 2019, the Delivery Hero group hit the milestone of processing 2 million orders in a single day. This means that 23 orders are delivered every second. The moment the rider rings the doorbell and hands over the delivery (such as food, groceries, flowers or pharmaceuticals) usually marks the end of the order process for the customer – but it’s the beginning of the financial processes that direct the flow of money from the customer to the restaurant or shop.

With 23 orders in a second, it goes without saying that these processes need to be highly automated in order to be fast and efficient. “The explosive growth in orders and revenues implies a massive increase in finance transactions,” confirms Johannes Langguth, who is Senior Director in the finance systems team at Delivery Hero. Johannes’ team is developing the technology that automates all financial transactions and standardizes the back office of the company on a global scale. Based in Berlin, they are developing and implementing SAP (a software to manage business operations) solutions for the whole organization – from Latin America to Europe and Asia Pacific.

An award-winning mindset of innovation

Because our operations are highly complex and fast-changing, the finance systems team not only implements and tailors existing SAP solutions, but also realizes custom-made developments in the SAP cloud platform. These developments advance the tools and processes at Delivery Hero, and at the same time they change the SAP software itself: In-house developments are fed back to SAP and often become an integral part of the product, so other companies can benefit from the solutions as well.

To deliver a great customer experience and grow a business as fast as Delivery Hero, you need a great vision, passion, and people who love to innovate.

Hartmut Thomsen, President Middle- and Eastern Europe, SAP

With a focus on innovation, Delivery Hero’s finance systems team is also piloting new technologies that are likely to shape the industry: “For example, we are one of SAP’s first customers to connect conversational artificial intelligence with their backend system S/4HANA. We deploy chatbots and use machine learning scenarios from SAP Analytics cloud to get insights into our expenses and other metrics,” Johannes explains.

Johannes Langguth is Senior Director in the finance systems team at Delivery Hero

Earlier this year, the team proudly received the 2019 SAP Innovation Award for workflow feature that was developed in-house – one of many recognitions for their achievements in the SAP universe.

“To deliver a great customer experience and grow a business as fast as Delivery Hero, you need a great vision, passion, and people who love to innovate,” says Hartmut Thomsen, President Middle- and Eastern Europe, SAP. “Customers like Delivery Hero are our inspiration to build the solutions and platform that supports them on their journey to the intelligent enterprise fueling rapid growth and customer satisfaction.”

How to build a global solution from scratch

In a fast changing industry, innovation is key so that financial processes can cope with the pace of the business. In Johannes’ case, that meant starting from scratch and developing one of the largest SAP solutions globally within less than three years: “When I joined Delivery Hero in 2016, there was no finance systems team at all. Hiring all these amazing colleagues (we’re more than 50 today!) and evolving processes, infrastructure and team alongside with the growth of the company is something we can be really proud of.”

Similar to our colleagues in other departments, our finance systems team works with agile methodologies and brings solutions live fast and at an early stage.

Johannes Langguth

What started with ‘just’ an accounting software developed to a broad solution portfolio ranging from procurement (SAP ARIBA) and travel (SAP Concur) to billing (SAP S/4HANA), analytics (SAP analytics cloud) and custom built services (SAP cloud platform). By building the whole back office in SAP, the tools can be easily connected to each other, which simplifies and optimizes business processes.

Today, the finance systems team is the largest team in Delivery Hero’s finance department, with more than 50 employees and 20 external consultants.

What makes working in finance systems at Delivery Hero special? It’s the pace and the level of innovation that needs to come with it, says Johannes: “In contrast to other companies the speed of solution development at Delivery Hero is way faster and based on technology stacks that are more state-of-the-art. Similar to our colleagues in other departments, our finance systems team works with agile methodologies and brings solutions live fast and at an early stage – and then constantly improves them based on the feedback we get.”

Our next goal: 100% automation

At the intersection of finance and tech, the finance systems team is building the foundation for our company to grow even further and expand into new business streams. “In the next few years we are going to change the way we work in finance towards full automation with zero manual input required for standard processes. That way, finance experts can focus completely on interpreting analytical insights generated by the system and on their role as a business partner within the organization.”

Do you want to join the Delivery Hero finance systems team on their mission? See our open positions.