Introducing… These are the nominees for the first HR Technology Awards: Just Eat Takeaway.com
Last week, the HR Technology Awards were presented for the first time. For the Best HR Transformation using Technology category, three nominees were eligible. In this article, Karya Imirzalioglu, Global Head of People Technology at Just Eat Takeaway.com, the winner of this award, tells you all about the RPA robot that is used for efficiency and employee satisfaction in the HR department.
Can you start by briefly introducing yourself to us?
“I’m Karya Imirzalioglu, Global Head of People Technology at Just Eat Takeaway.com. I am Turkish and have been living in the Netherlands for the past six years. During my first year in the Netherlands, I worked at IBM as a consultant and for the past five years I have fulfilled various roles at Just Eat Takaway.com at our headquarters in Amsterdam. I also lived in the Netherlands in my youth, because of my father’s work in the oil and gas industry and prior to moving to Amsterdam for IBM I worked in London, where I started my consultancy career at Deloitte. Through my career in consulting, I gained experience in multiple HR Tech transformations and realized my passion for technology and innovation. I initially specialized in Workday, however over time I have become familiar with a multitude of HR Technologies.
Can you tell us a bit more about Just Eat Takeaway.com and the HR technology challenges you face?
“Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET), best known in the Netherlands as the parent company of Thuisbezorgd.nl, is a leading global delivery platform. After 2015, the company has grown rapidly both through organic growth and through acquisitions and mergers (such as Lieferando.de and Just Eat). Just Eat Takeaway.com is active in 20 countries and has approximately 16,000 employees around the world. The People Technology team is currently a team of 12 but continues to grow.
“As an online food tech company, we strive to keep the agility of a startup and aim to stay one step ahead of the competition. It is wonderful to work here. It’s such a fast-pacing environment. In the first three years I worked here; we grew incredibly fast. During the merger with Just Eat, I became the Functional Lead for Workday. I was responsible for the integration of all the different modules that the companies implemented in their Workday environment into one Workday environment. That was a huge project. It took us about a year and a half in total. I now manage the entire People Technology team and we’ve grown into a phase where it’s no longer just about Workday, it’s about all kinds of other innovative HR technologies, systems and tools.”
Why did you participate in the HR Technology Awards and what innovative project did you submit?
“I heard about the event through Bart Reintjes, our Senior Director of People Services & Technology and we immediately thought: cool, we have to participate in that! There are many different HR technology conferences, but there was no independent Award Show in the Netherlands. We decided to submit our Jet Pay RPA project, which stands for ‘Robotic Process Automation’. This was a new journey which we embarked upon with a project team with colleagues from our People Technology and our HR Operation team. I wasn’t involved in the project personally, but I was proudly representing the team. Unfortunately, our project leads Luciana Popescu and Ellie Horne as well as the involved talented team couldn’t be present at the Award Show.”
Can you tell us more about your RPA project?
“At Just Eat Takeaway.com, we have been able to develop our HR technology landscape a lot in recent years. We were working with Workday in both companies since 2017 and have most of their modules in use, as well as a very robust HR technology landscape. While our HR team has digitized and in part automated a lot of HR processes via Workday and integrations in/to other systems, the smaller, country specific or niche processes are sometimes hard to find solutions for in enterprise systems such as Workday. Therefore, some improvements are deprioritized in favor of bigger tech implementations, meaning a lot of manual work continues. That’s why we decided to introduce RPA as part of our HR Tech Toolkit and launched a pilot project to automate the administration of our JET Pay employee benefit. We were aiming for an automated process to increase efficiency, lower cost, improve accuracy and a create an overall better employee experience.”
We chose UIPath as our RPA software and decided to implement with Incentro, our implementation Partner. The process which we chose to automate was the administration of the JET Pay benefit for employees. JET Pay is a fixed monthly allowance which we provide to employees. Employees are given an allowance which they can use at the facilities in our office, for example in our canteen, or order from their favourite restaurant using our website or app. We also offer JET Pay to corporate clients. JET Pay allows businesses to provide its employees with meal benefit plans, enabling them to order from a wide range of Just Eat Takeaway.com restaurant partners.
The process we had in place for JET Pay was very manual, causing our HR Operations colleagues to pull New Hire, Change Job and Termination data from Workday to manual enter relevant data in our internally built JET Pay Platform. Now this is all automated and via our ‘digital colleague’ ‘Jetty’. Jetty is our HR bot who now does this process on behalf of our HR Operations team saving them time from doing boring, repetitive tasks.’
What has the project brought you so far?
“The main goal of this project was to fully automate the JET Pay process to reduce the time spent by HR operations on manual tasks. And we succeeded, time spent is reduced by 80%, but looking back, this project has brought us more than just that. It has enabled us to evaluate and redesign our approach into a global and standardized process. This has not only simplified the process, but also created more accuracy and compliance when handling sensitive data.”
“In addition, we have been able to drive the successful adoption of RPA within our HR Operations team. We did this by ensuring they were involved in the project every step of the way. We held a competition to name our new digital colleague. This is how we came up with the name ‘Jetty’ (‘JET’ is a commonly used acronym within our company to shorten ‘Just Eat Takeaway.com’). By giving Jetty a face, communication about RPA and the bot became easier and more fun. We also made sure we invested a lot of time in training the HR Operations team on the new process as well as on what RPA is in general. As a result, our HR Operations team is very satisfied with the results, with 100% of them giving Jetty a 4 or 5 out of 5 score for satisfaction. Because of Jetty, they have more time for other tasks, that the use of RPA has allowed us to improve and standardize the process and that they want to continue working with Jetty in the future and on more processes. RPA can be a relatively quick and cost-effective solution for automating process spanning multiple systems.”
What are your plans for the future in the field of RPA?
“We have now done this pilot for 9 countries. We want to not only expand that to more countries but also look into automating other parts of the process which we haven’t tackled yet. In addition, we are doing a lot of investigation on what other HR processes we can use RPA for, in particular we are looking into certain payroll processes. What I find particularly interesting about our journey into using RPA software as a company is that we were at the forefront of adopting this technology in comparison to other departments within JET. After our successful deployment of the automated JET Pay process we now see that other departments within Just Eat Takeaway.com also eager to get started with RPA.”
Why do you think you were nominated?
“I think we were nominated because the use of RPA is still relatively uncommon in many HR organizations, and this project is a great example of how a relatively small use-case can have such a great impact. I also liked that we were able to share our experiences with other organizations and hopefully also learn about their experiences with regards to other HR technologies. We are an innovative tech company and we want to translate that to how we apply HR Technology. We are looking to expand our team over the next year and so, the nomination and potentially winning the award will also help us to attract great HR tech candidates.”
Karya Imirzalioglu
Global Head of People Technology at Just Eat Takeaway.com
About the HR Technology Awards
As no independent awards have yet been presented for HR technology in the Netherlands, Bas Eggelaar, founder of SuccessDay, decided it was high time to make it happen. Several partners soon joined the event.
The jury of the HR Technology Awards consisted of chairman Anne Jaakke (HR Changemaker) Louis Luijten (Diverse Board positions & Alumni CIO ASML) Rolf Jorna (Alumni Head of Group HR Action), Derk Jan Koole (Business Leader Career at Mercer), Helen Richardson (CHRO at Renewi), Erwin Hoogeveen (CHRO Fugro) and Pascale Peters (Professor of Strategic Human Resource Management at Nyenrode Business University).
The Award show took place on September 19th at De Kazerne in Brainport, the heart of European innovation. THE networking event in the field of HR Technology was attended by approximately 100 CHROs, CIOs, and HR and IT Directors. In addition to the previously mentioned categories, awards were also presented in the categories of Best HR Technology Product Innovation of the Year and Best NextGen HR Technology.
