With its online delivery services available in over 70 countries, Delivery Hero – the world’s leading local delivery platform – is one of the success stories of German digital companies. Although Delivery Hero no longer serves Germany as a market, it was founded and is headquartered in Berlin. The globally distributed teams work together via Slack – and also use Slack to intelligently and efficiently spread the added value of other software solutions such as Tableau through the company.
Torsten Pfahl, Senior Specialist Enterprise IT Solutions at Delivery Hero SE, has been with the company since it had a few hundred employees. There are now around 44,000 people -–and they all use Slack. “Without a tool like Slack, we would never have been able to grow like this and coordinate everything,” he says. This is because many companies have been united under the Delivery Hero umbrella – some founded by the company itself, some acquired. As a result, employees working around the globe and coming from a wide variety of nations and corporate cultures are now part of one company.
Slack, which Delivery Hero is using in the Enterprise Grid, came into the company with the acquisition of Foodpanda in 2016. “The early adopters of Slack were in our developer community. They use it for communication, of course, but also to automate processes and for their notification management. The successful use of Slack has spread rapidly throughout the organization,” says Pfahl. “In addition to our developers, it is primarily departments that communicate with the restaurants who use integrations. This also applies to those involved in order management or colleagues in internal communication.”
Slack is used across all levels at Delivery Hero – right up to the C-level. Company-wide announcements and updates appear via Slack. “The CEO and the Chief People Officer use it a lot,” says Pfahl. CEO Niklas Östberg is frequently using Slack to connect with and address employees globally on topics such as business strategy, to celebrate achievements and successes, or to give updates on what he has been up to lately.
“Integrations are very valuable for a range of teams.”
Slack is part of everyday working life – with the most diverse facets
With around 44,000 employees, 11 brands and umpteen departments, there are a wide variety of use cases for Slack. “Integrations are very valuable for a range of teams. The Workday and Salesforce integrations in particular make day-to-day work easier for many,” says Pfahl.
Slack is also an important tool for managers at all levels. They get notifications in Slack, receive reports from Tableau on their most important KPIs and can issue approvals directly without having to switch systems.
Slack is ever-present in employees’ everyday lives – and it is also the tool of choice for receiving information on office space usage, connecting with Employee Resource Groups or being notified that packages have arrived.
The HR department is fostering the low-threshold exchange with everyone via a chatbot -–and of course there are established processes in the IT department for reporting incidents, automatically creating tickets in Jira or having employees pass on low-priority problems such as the receipt of spam messages.
What is particularly interesting about Delivery Hero, however, is that the company does not just use different Slack solutions on their own. Delivery Hero also uses Slack in conjunction with other tools in order to intelligently and efficiently spread its added value throughout the company. The combination of Tableau and Slack – both of which belong to Salesforce –stands out in particular.
One reporting platform for all purposes
Tableau has been Delivery Hero’s reporting tool from the very beginning. The data visualization platform has over 10,000 active users per month and is available in eleven regions. Vaibhow Shukla, Senior Manager Analytics, leads the Analytics team at Delivery Hero Europe. “We use Tableau in many areas – from logistics to marketing and CRM to quick commerce,” she says. “As data analysts, we are responsible for creating and maintaining dashboards for all of them.”
That includes dashboards that display the key business metrics and daily relevant KPIs -–such as orders, user flow or performance measurements – as well as more complex ones that allow you to dive deep into topics.
“Sometimes it’s not about seeing where you stand in terms of goals, but about analyzing why something is not running smoothly. We offer solutions that allow users to select their metrics and analyze them easily,” explains Shukla. Then, they can use filter functions to take a closer look at user segments or regional distributions and use multiple filters to see exactly how trends are developing and what insights they can draw from a deep look into the data.
“We use Tableau in many areas – from logistics, marketing and CRM to quick commerce.”
The most important KPIs at a glance with Slack
These complex dashboards are used directly in Tableau because all filter options and the full data are available live. For the dashboards that capture the core business metrics and represent the global standard reporting, Delivery Hero Central also uses the integration of Tableau in Slack. In the case of Delivery Hero, this is done via a self-developed app. The integration ensures that managers receive the reports relevant to them every morning as a PDF directly via Slack.
This gives management the data they need at a glance. As the reports are sent to special channels, everyone for whom they are relevant can also exchange information directly – including the person responsible for the OKRs.
This exchange was the goal – and it works. “We see at least 10 times as much interaction with the reports as before, when they were sent via email,” says Shukla. “Having access to the reports directly in Slack leads to more conversations. And it gives everyone a greater awareness of the role of data in day-to-day business. They can pull up their data with a single click -–and we’re seeing more data-driven action as a result.”
The original solution originally introduced in C-level management is now of interest to almost all management levels. The respective heads also want automated reporting for their data.
“We see at least 10 times as much interaction with the reports.”
More transparency to deliver true added value
Shazni Shoffie, Data Analytics Manager for the APAC region, is seeing the same benefits. Delivery Hero also uses Slack integration for global reporting there. “When the data is in one place and the conversations are in another, everything feels disjointed.
The Tableau-Slack integration makes it much easier to follow conversations on a Tableau report in threads than in multiple disjointed email chains,” says Shoffie.
The reports go into channels sorted by topic and teams. “We always ask ourselves how we can streamline the way business teams receive reports and have conversations,” explains Shoffie. “But when it comes to sensitive data, it’s obviously necessary to have multiple reports and channels.” This ensures everyone has access to the data they need – but no more.
In addition to the generally higher level of exchange on reports, the integration has another valuable feedback function for Shoffie and his team: it is much more transparent for them which reports are really heavily used – and which are not. “On this basis, we can decide which reports we should no longer maintain and instead invest our resources in the topics that are more important to the teams, and that really benefit them,” says Shoffie.
Being able to prioritize correctly, deliver the best added value to the business and shorten the time to action – these are key goals for Shoffie that Slack is helping him and his team achieve. One example are channels that have brought the analyst community closer together. The simpler and thus stronger exchange increases trust in each other -–and the commitment that everyone maintains their respective metrics and domains in such a way that everyone can work with them.
The team also uses Slack intensively for its own projects and for maintenance monitoring. This allows teams to keep an eye on the infrastructure and notify developers if certain projects are using too much capacity and are running into problems. “The table owners get notified by Slack when they should optimize queries – and where they need to act quickly before it disrupts business-as-usual,” explains Shoffie.
The combination of Tableau and Slack helps to establish a data-driven corporate culture. “A data culture starts with employees having access to the data in a collaborative space,” says Shoffie. “They need to be able to talk about the data. To do this, it is necessary to provide them with single space to discuss, learn and enable them to drive actions from the data. Value creation becomes easier that way.” Slack and Tableau enable exactly that. This makes it much easier to make data-based decisions and take action.
“A good data culture starts with employees having access to the data in a collaborative space.”
Empower the Tableau Creator Community with Slack and Slack Canvas
To ensure that Tableau can serve everyone at Delivery Hero well as a platform, it is important to maintain the Creator Community. It now consists of around 700 employees. “As the community has grown so much, it has become increasingly difficult to communicate about the different processes that the respective companies have. This also includes access requests or license applications,” explains Valentina Leivas, Senior Manager Analytics at Delivery Hero SE, who is centrally responsible for the reporting systems.
It should also become easier to share best practices and get an overview of who others in the community can contact for information on a specific dashboard or specific questions.
That’s why Leivas’ team has developed an onboarding canvas that will be rolled out to Slack channels for creators in the first quarter of 2024. The Canvas provides them with all the information they need in one place: how they can get access to the different channels, what training is available and who the champions are that they can contact with questions. Canvas creates a place directly in Slack where all information and assets can be centrally found. This information is available at a glance at any time – and can be updated with the latest information at any time.
The application scenario goes beyond a pure onboarding phase: if someone wants to have access to a specific dashboard, they can use the canvas to quickly see in which region the person responsible is located, who this person is and how they themselves can gain access to adapt the dashboard for their use case.
“The idea is that they have one source and don’t have to look in different places in different systems,” says Leivas. This gives the community more transparency, allowing them to work better – and saving them time. Until now, the solution was to tag Leivas in the global Slack channel when they had questions.
The impetus for the canvas also came from a survey of the creator community. The results were incorporated into the roadmap. Among other things, this includes more learning paths for the community. At the moment, these are mainly available for developers. In the next step, other groups of employees will also receive more training opportunities. On this basis, the data-driven work culture can become more widespread.
“The idea is that they have one source and don't have to look in different places and systems.”
Delivery Hero is a prime example of how a highly dynamic company with distributed teams can organize and coordinate its collaboration. The smart connection of Slack with solutions such as Tableau allows all employees to have access to the information and data they need. Slack Canvas serves as an important tool to ensure that employees can quickly tap into the potential of the solutions – and thus better establish a data-driven corporate culture.
