Delivery Hero achieves efficiency and savings by centralizing 40,000+ employees on one System of Work

Challenge: Delivery Hero scaled to 40,000+ employees across 11 brands in around 70 countries. Fast growth and acquisitions hindered collaboration and standardization, while increasing costs, tech debt, risk, and maintenance.

Solution: Delivery Hero partnered with Atlassian and Adaptavist to consolidate and migrate from disparate tools and instances on different deployments, to one System of Work powered by Atlassian Cloud Enterprise. 

Impact: Since standardizing with one secure cloud platform, employees are happier, more efficient, collaborative, and innovative – all while the company saw a 69% cost savings in the first three years alone.

On a mission to deliver the best experience for customers and colleagues

Launched as an online food ordering startup in 2011, Delivery Hero has scaled into the world's leading local delivery company, handling over 10 million deliveries per day. Millions of customers count on Delivery Hero to deliver everything from food to flashlights. It's a massive effort that requires more than 40,000 employees across almost 70 countries working together — and they do it by collaborating on one System of Work powered by Atlassian.

With support from Atlassian and its Solution Partner, Adaptavist, Delivery Hero centralized from many tools and more than a dozen Atlassian instances across multiple deployment types, to one Atlassian Cloud Enterprise platform. Now, users and admins alike are enjoying:

• Over 69% in cost savings in the first three years alone

• Working more efficiently, without downtime disruptions or tedious administrative tasks 

• Less worry about risk, thanks to stronger, more proactive security measures

• Collaborating on one easy-to-use platform, with new capabilities that help deliver more value, faster

Mergers and acquisitions create new opportunities and obstacles

Mergers and acquisitions helped Delivery Hero scale their workforce by 5x in five years – but also created new challenges with infrastructure and collaboration. With so many people working across so many tools, deployments, and instances, working together toward shared goals was beyond difficult. 

Tool proliferation was also driving up costs and complexity. Plus, the more employees who joined Delivery Hero, the more load was added to aging systems, leading to downtime for users and burdensome maintenance for admins. 

The Enterprise IT Solutions Team knew a solution had to be found for these challenges. The more they learned about Atlassian Cloud, the more intrigued they were. Migrating would not only improve collaboration, scalability, security, and costs, but also unlock access to new apps that would support their goals, like Atlassian Guard for governance, Analytics for data-driven decision-making, and Rovo for productivity and innovation. The decision was clear: It was time to make a change so Delivery Hero could remain a leader for its customers and employees.

Connecting disparate tools and teams with one central solution

The Enterprise IT’s Atlassian Administration Team set out to help Delivery Hero centralize and standardize on Atlassian Cloud to improve life for users and admins, while boosting the company’s bottom line. 

The team’s first big decision was which tool to choose as the hub for Delivery Hero’s collaboration. Delivery Hero had used Atlassian since its infancy and acquired several companies that used other tools, like Asana, Monday, SmartSheets, Salesforce, and Zendesk. Atlassian Administrator Jousef Waggad says, “After comparing collaboration and productivity tools, I knew Atlassian should be our #1 platform. Everything else felt too simple or too complex. Atlassian was intuitive enough for our basic users and advanced enough for our power users.”

An AWS partnership makes the shift even simpler

The next challenge was building a business case to gain buy-in from leadership. With Atlassian’s support, Jousef and Team Lead Shahinya “Sha” Häckel showed them how consolidating tools, combining Atlassian instances, and migrating from Atlassian Server to Cloud Enterprise would enable collaboration, reduce costs and maintenance, improve security, and unlock new capabilities to fuel innovation, like AI. 

Leaders saw the value in Sha’s and Jousef’s proposal, and they were even more enthused when they learned Delivery Hero could purchase licenses through the AWS Marketplace. Sha says, “Buying Atlassian Cloud licenses through the AWS Marketplace streamlines procurement, improves controls, and saves money. It made the decision to centralize with Atlassian even easier.”

Impossible alone: Joining forces makes the journey 40% faster and endlessly easier

With the consolidation and migration approved, Sha and Jousef began planning how to migrate employees who were using other tools, shift Delivery Hero’s Server instances to Cloud, and merge several cloud instances the company had accumulated and acquired over time. 

“This wasn’t just about consolidating and standardizing within Atlassian, but also about bringing together multiple entities around the world who all have their own configurations and processes,” Jousef says. 

Thanks to their Advisory Services engagement, Jousef and Sha took advantage of Atlassian Advisory Services to help navigate this large, complex initiative. “Atlassian’s Advisory Services Team helped us learn how Atlassian Cloud works, shaped our strategy, and guided us through how to organize all our companies on the platform with the most effective structure and efficient licensing,” Jousef recalls. 

Over the next few months, the team partnered with Atlassian and Adaptavist through preparation, consolidation of over a dozen Delivery Hero Server instances, migrating all of them to one Atlassian Cloud platform, change management, and onboarding. “Shifting to the cloud is impossible alone,” Sha says. “Together with Atlassian and our Solution Partner, we centralized and migrated 40,000 users from multiple siloed tools to one Atlassian Cloud Enterprise Platform in six months – 40% faster than originally planned.”

Better, faster experiences: delivered ✅

Since completing their consolidation and migration, Delivery Hero has already seen massive improvements and continues to optimize their platform and explore new capabilities. In addition to ongoing cost savings, Sha and Jousef say they notice the biggest differences in efficiency, performance, security, and satisfaction. 

69% saved in three years

Delivery Hero expects to see a cost savings of 69% in the first three years alone by centralizing their organizations and instances, and migrating all instances to Atlassian Cloud Enterprise.  

Efficiency: greater standardization and performance, lower maintenance 

Standardizing systems and ways of working across the organization will not only make it easier for employees to work together, but will also enable more competitive pricing for customers and economies of scale for the business. 

Standardizing has also significantly reduced maintenance, freeing up Atlassian administrators and engineers to focus on more strategic initiatives. Sha says, “Before, when our systems went down, it would take our four team members up to seven hours to fix each time. Now on Atlassian Cloud Enterprise, we never have downtime, so we can shift more than 1,000 hours of time and effort to more valuable work.”

Security: stronger and more proactive 

Since consolidating instances and migrating to Atlassian Cloud Enterprise, the Enterprise IT Team feels more confident than ever in their security posture. “Security used to be a concern, but that’s a thing of the past,” Sha says. “The Cloud Enterprise plan and Atlassian Guard not only made sense for our size and requirements, but have also helped us proactively reduce data loss and risks like shadow IT.”

User satisfaction: higher

Working on Atlassian Cloud is a better experience for users and admins alike. “Our teams say all the Atlassian Cloud is so much easier to use, collaborative, and enables them to do more,” Jousef says. “Managing the platform is so much easier for admins too because everything from user controls to app purchasing is in one place.”

Plus: new cloud capabilities and self-service

“There are so many features and capabilities built into Atlassian Cloud, which means a better user experience and less maintenance. When we still want to use third-party apps to enhance our platform, integrations are easier on the cloud,” Jousef says.

Sha adds that satisfaction has risen even higher as employees started using cloud features and apps, like Atlassian Analytics, Automation, and Rovo. “Atlassian Analytics gives teams a much clearer picture of usage and performance,” she says. 

She continues, “With Rovo, employees no longer need to depend on our admins for tasks like creating automations. They can just press a button and use natural language instead of code.”

From “We can’t keep up” to “What’s next?”

Delivery Hero is on a mission to deliver the best experience – not only for their customers, but also for their employees.

While siloes and tool proliferation held the company back from achieving this mission before, the migration and consolidation have helped them not just get back on track, but pave the way for a promising future. “We want to attract top talent and deliver the best experience possible for our customers and colleagues,” Sha says, “Whenever I heard of new features or capabilities that would help us do that, I used to think, ‘That all sounds great, but we can’t do it with so many silos and server-based systems.’ Now, we can!”