Find out about what it is like to work in the Delivery Hero Salesforce team, the challenges that lay ahead, and why it is an exciting time to work in this field with Rams Chowdary Kadiyala, Director of Salesforce Engineering.
Tell us more about yourself! How did you develop your career?
During my studies in Computer Science, Computer Applications and Software Systems in India, I had already started working as a Software Engineer mainly focusing on Java. Since 2009, so almost 10 years ago, I increasingly started working on Salesforce. I started off as a Developer, then became a Technical Lead and a Technical Architect and now I’m the Director of Salesforce Engineering at Delivery Hero (DH). I worked in various big corporates like Thomson Reuters, General Electric and Shell before I joined DH in June this year.
Why did you decide to work for Delivery Hero?
I only joined Delivery Hero recently. I worked in really big corporates before, where you had processes and structures in place. But I was looking for a more challenging opportunity.
I decided to join Delivery Hero because I had the option to set up a global Salesforce structure from scratch. I’m passionate as I am able to build a bigger team, taking the existing structures to the next level.
Currently, the various Delivery Hero entities are using Salesforce in different ways, with different processes. Our task is to understand the strategic needs of the business and how these needs can be translated. With this we can forecast and create a dynamic but stable global Salesforce architecture that is able to adapt to the local needs.
How is your current team structure and culture?
Our team includes nine people. We plan on doubling the size within the next two years. Our team consists of people from all over the world, with many different backgrounds and ideas. For instance, we have colleagues from Spain, UK, Colombia, Brazil, India, Lithuania and Germany. I would really like to keep it that way, as everyone is brings their experiences from their different cultures.
We try to socialize outside of the office too, to create a more open and dynamic working environment.
Why does Delivery Hero need Salesforce and what are the most interesting tasks you are currently working on?
Salesforce is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool that we use globally to structure and organize relationships with our partner restaurants. Different departments within the company (Marketing, Sales, Logistics, Customer Operations and Restaurant Operations) make use of it on a daily basis in order to guarantee smooth and easily trackable communications and processes with our partners.
This is important for us to understand when talking about current tasks that we are working on.
Since we are growing a lot, we need to move away from having many localized solutions, to one global Salesforce platform. This architecture needs to be created while still being flexible enough to onboard new countries and to respond to localized requirements.
Another major aspect that is also interrelated to the previous one is master data warehousing. These processes within the different departments and various countries produce data that needs to be stored, shared with other systems through interfaces. Salesforce integrated with up to 15 different systems – which require stable but also dynamic APIs to ensure a smooth data flow. This is not only crucial for the restaurant onboarding process, or shipping marketing material to our partner restaurants, but also for integrations to applications for the purpose of billing and invoicing. These APIs need to be adjusted to one global infrastructure.
Last but not least, a major task for the next year is to upgrade the global Salesforce infrastructure to the Salesforce Lightning experience. This is an improved version of Salesforce, which uses a modern user interface to better support our colleagues who are currently using the older version of salesforce.
Even though a lot of the mentioned topics are in place locally already, the major task for my team is to create one global solution that works for every entity. This includes creating a great Salesforce Lightning experience for all users as well as building efficient interfaces and flexible APIs.
What can a new team member expect to learn in your team?
First of all, if you are coming from a very technical background, there is a great opportunity to understand the business side of how and why Salesforce is employed. A new team member needs to learn about the different steps and tasks of other departments, in order to create an overall solution for them. It starts with marketing and generating leads, over restaurant onboarding and shipping the equipment to the restaurants to get started, to the daily support provided by our restaurant operation teams.
Without the necessary understanding of these processes and steps and a strategic business view, our global Salesforce framework will not be a useful and smart tool for our colleagues at Delivery Hero.
There are opportunities to enhance your knowledge on how to create UI components, programs and APIs using latest platform features. These include: lightning design system, platform events, platform cache, CTI (Computer-Telephony Integration), Git repository source code versioning and employ continuous integration and deployments using Jenkins. An opportunity to work with ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools for data and instance migration projects right away.
What kind of new team members are you looking for?
We need more team members who are able to build a unique solution for the global Delivery Hero Restaurant Management. Since this phase is crucial to building a globally functioning infrastructure, we are looking for people who can come up with creative solutions to build an efficient, solid and scalable system in Salesforce.
Thank you Rams!
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