Business & Innovation
- May 9, 2019

How finance is connecting our teams around the globe

10 questions to Andreas Chorosis, Vice President Oeconomics Innovation at Delivery Hero SE.
1. Andreas, you’re working as VP Oeconomics Innovation in Delivery Hero’s Finance department. What exactly is the scope of your role?

At Delivery Hero, we’re a global operation dedicated to innovating the food delivery experience. Constantly adapting our business models, automating processes and embracing technological change are among our top strategic priorities.

Our high-level goal is to reduce complexity by understanding how business functions are connected and how they interact. It’s essential to align our internal business processes in order to scale the business while ensuring business continuity. To achieve this goal, my team and I have launched a number of initiatives focused on optimizing core processes. These are being introduced in various departments, both in our central team and within our brands around the world.

Our high-level goal is to reduce complexity by understanding how business functions are connected and how they interact.

By enabling our teams across all regions to map and analyze their processes, we create transparency and a collaborative environment (Process Excellence). This in turn gives Delivery Hero the opportunity to optimize operations across the board, and provides a solid basis to drive company-wide innovation through technical solutions.

2. You previously worked at huge consulting companies. In how far does working at Delivery Hero feel different for you? What are the highlights and challenges?

The best part is the digital culture and the openness to change. Readiness for digitalization is genetically anchored in the organization. Technologically, we’re already pursuing the right strategy, and the people are really dedicated.

Sometimes it can be a bit challenging to channel all this energy, as change is moving in every direction. We have to work even more collaboratively, leverage the best ideas, act as true business partners and identify potential for automation. That’s what we’re working on.

3.Scaling up is a challenge that a lot of start-ups need to go through at one point. Is there anything special about the way Delivery Hero tackled this challenge?

Scaling at Delivery Hero creates the same financial challenges as for every other start-up with explosive growth.

However, Delivery Hero has an added level of complexity compared to other start-ups as our international expansion was realized inorganically. This means we are met with the added challenges of integrating new businesses, teams, and IT systems – and enabling all these different elements to tackle the scaling challenges accordingly.

Simply put, we want to make everyone’s work less complicated and less burdened with administrative tasks.

At the same time it’s crucial that as we pursue global growth with the agility of a start-up, we ensure compliance across the board – especially for a fast-growing and listed company like Delivery Hero. Balancing all these factors as well as driving new initiatives is one of the challenges I face in my role.

4. Often, finance is (wrongly) perceived as a rather static, bureaucratic sector. How does Delivery Hero innovate on a finance level?

At Delivery Hero, finance has touchpoints in every single interaction between Delivery Hero, its partners and customers.

Therefore, innovation in finance mainly centres around working together with various stakeholders to implement innovative approaches to our daily work and to improve collaboration with other teams and countries. Specifically, this means: digitizing activities, streamlining processes and automating manual tasks.

Especially automation is crucial if we want to optimize daily number crunching, plant the scaling mindset and equip our teams with the expertise to make business decisions around digital transformation.

Andreas Chorosis VP Finance Innovation

Andreas and his team are rolling out Process Excellence to Delivery Hero departments globally

5. You mentioned that you work closely with our local teams around the world. Where have you traveled to recently, and what impressed you most?

In the past months we traveled to countries in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and kicked off a global transition initiative to further develop our finance function and processes together with local teams.

It was great to see first hand how our local colleagues are working, and to better understand their needs.

I am really impressed by the drive, motivation and commitment in each of our local teams. It’s amazing to see how we’re all striving for the same goal: “To always deliver an amazing experience” while taking different roads in order to satisfy each market’s very specific needs.

6. What have you and your team achieved in the last months that you’re particularly proud of?

One of our goals is to establish a culture of innovation and Process Excellence across departments and all our brands.

I am really impressed by the drive, motivation and commitment in each of our local teams. It’s amazing to see how we’re all striving for the same goal.

With this in mind, one of the first things we did was to build a team of Process Excellence experts. After only 8 months, we’ve already engaged and trained colleagues from different departments, including Sales, Global Operations, People, GRC, and within different regions. All are acting as ambassadors for Process Excellence within their own departments.

We’re also proud of the initiatives we launched, which significantly reduced paper-based work, digitized and automated processes, and increased transparency.

7. Why is it important to engage different departments across countries to support and drive this vision of process excellence?

By developing a system where every team worldwide runs and documents their processes in a standardised way, we achieve a transparency that allows us to identify local improvement opportunities.

This requires a high level of collaboration, which we achieve by connecting and coordinating people, processes and data. We can then share leading practices across countries and brands and make real knowledge exchange happen.

Artificial intelligence, predictive data analytics and process automation […] will massively change the set up and activities of finance departments across all industries.

In the last 6 months, we trained around 75 people worldwide on Business Process Modelling and mapped more than 500 processes across all departments. We are striving to extend this team and its expertise to all of our brands within the next few months.

8. How do you expect the finance sector to evolve over the next few years?

We’re seeing the advent of several sectors that are disrupting financial operations as we know them. The key technological drivers of this disruption are artificial intelligence, predictive data analytics and process automation, which will massively change the set up and activities of finance departments across all industries.

Practically this will result in real-time, automated financial reporting, using advanced processes and analytics. As such, there will be a rising demand for financial positions with technical, business and soft skills.

9. And how will your team make sure to be part of these new developments?

My team continuously strives to improve financial processes and works closely with other departments on this journey – a necessity to understand and drive innovation.

The big task is to act proactively and support the business with scalable processes. Simply put, we want to make everyone’s work less complicated and less burdened with administrative tasks.

As a way of maximising my team’s impact, we will rely on a feedforward approach – with trainings and solution focus groups to implement leading practices and facilitate a company-wide culture of learning and collaboration when it comes to core processes.

10. Are you planning to grow your team, and what kind of people do you need on board?

We are a young and growing team motivated to spread the Process Excellence culture across Delivery Hero and our brands globally, as well as drive innovative financial projects.

I see a lot of potential for new opportunities, as well as opportunities for involving current employees from other departments in our projects to drive further growth.

For our core team, we need “business partners” with a good combination of finance, process and technical skills. I highly value people with an appetite for innovation.

Want to know what innovation tastes like? Join the team: deliveryhero.com/career

Written by


Robin Nierynck

Senior Specialist, Global Communications Delivery Hero

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