Delivery Hero Supports One Million Orders Daily with SAP Environment on AWS

Delivery Hero, based in Germany, is a growing food delivery network that works with more than 500,000 restaurant partners in 42 countries to transport millions of food orders to customers daily via online ordering applications.

The company is growing by 100 percent year-over-year, and it struggled to scale its SAP application environment to support that growth using its on-premises infrastructure. Specifically, the company’s SAP S/4HANA enterprise resource planning system collects orders and generates PDF-based invoices for each restaurant partner. “We expect to have hundreds of millions of daily transactions being executed in S/4HANA in the next few years,” says Niclas Hoye, director of finance systems for Delivery Hero. “That means much higher order volumes from different data systems and restaurant partners coming in every day. We already have 1 terabyte of data stored on S/4HANA, and we knew our legacy data center could not scale quickly enough to support that growth.”

Delivery Hero wanted to establish a global, centralized solution for processing orders and generating invoices. “In terms of scalability, we knew running our SAP environment in the cloud was probably the right move,” says Hoye.

To support its growing order volume, Delivery Hero migrated its S/4HANA environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS), using an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). “AWS offered the most mature and stable environment for our needs,” Hoye says. “We also saw that many other German companies were running on AWS. We reached out to some of them, such as Zalando, and learned they were highly satisfied with their experiences. That gave us a lot of confidence to move forward.”

Delivery Hero runs its S/4HANA application environment on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The company also extended its SAP capabilities using AWS serverless architecture. For example, instead of creating invoice PDFs directly within S/4HANA, Delivery Hero is currently testing AWS Lambda functions for generating PDFs from order invoice data and automatically sending them to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. “Because of the large growth in data volume, the process that generated PDF files had the longest job runtime,” says Hoye. “We realized that PDF creation would be a bottleneck at some point, and then we might not be able to finalize our billing on time. We believe AWS serverless architecture is the right solution to that problem because it gives us agility and elasticity as well as highly secure, global access to all PDF data.” Delivery Hero also uses SAP Cloud Platform on AWS to integrate with SAP S/4HANA to pull additional invoice data into Amazon S3.

Using AWS, Delivery Hero easily built and deployed its new architecture and migrated its S/4HANA production environment to AWS in one weekend. “We were worried about the migration because of the complexity of our SAP environment and our invoice processes, but it went smoothly because of the AWS services we used,” says Hoye.

Using its scalable AWS-based architecture for SAP S/4HANA, Delivery Hero processes up to one million orders daily and can scale to generate and store several million orders and thousands of invoice PDFs every day. “We can easily support our 100 percent yearly increase in order volume by running SAP S/4HANA on AWS,” says Hoye. In its previous on-premises environment, it would typically take weeks for Delivery Hero to gain enough compute capacity to scale its applications. “We would spend weeks ordering hardware and having system downtime while we provisioned everything,” Hoye says. “Now we simply switch instances in AWS in a few minutes and we can scale up on demand.”

The company can also scale its application servers down when necessary. “Using AWS, we have the ability to start or stop instances for our billing process jobs. When a billing job is scheduled, we automatically initiate an application server within that job and shut down the instance when the job completes. That would not have been possible before.”

Delivery Hero’s developers have more freedom to experiment easily and add innovative new features, shutting down sandbox environments if projects don’t work out. “We are an innovative company and we like to try out new projects without knowing if they will succeed,” says Hoye. “Our culture of innovation is enabled by the agility and elasticity we get from running on AWS. We can quickly shut down a project if it doesn’t provide the results we want, at very little cost compared to an on-premises environment. By running on AWS, we have the freedom to try out new initiatives without fear.”

“We want to integrate new AWS services as our business keeps growing,” says Hoye. “We know AWS will help us meet that growth.”

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