A middleware roadmap to keep Just Eat Takeaway’s systems up with its growth

Customer background

Just Eat Takeaway runs online food ordering marketplaces that connect customers with restaurants and, in many markets, with its own delivery drivers. Every order relies on several systems agreeing in real time: the menu and price the customer sees, the restaurant accepting the order, the driver collecting it, and the supply chain operations behind them. As the company grew, that chain of systems had to carry far more than it had been built for.

The challenge

The shop looked like the place to start. It was hard to update, and routine changes such as adding a campaign banner needed outside developers. But when Box UK mapped where orders came from, most didn’t go through the shop at all. They arrived through back-end systems, typically generated when couriers were onboarded or offboarded through the HR process.

That moved the problem to the work around the shop. Discovery found manual effort in onboarding, bulk ordering, stock, shipping and returns, and data spread across several systems that didn’t share it well. The question became how to take that manual work out of the systems around the shop.

Our approach

Box UK started with kick-off sessions and expert interviews to set the research agenda, then used a product vision board to pin down who the shop served and what the business needed from it. A target user matrix compared user groups by order volume and frequency, which is where the pattern in orders first showed up. Fulfilment journey mapping then traced the process from stock arriving at a warehouse to returns, marking where time was lost and where teams were working around the system.

On the technical side, the team mapped the existing architecture and asked Just Eat Takeaway’s own team to rate each platform and tool on a five-point scale from not fit for purpose to fit for purpose. Four quality attributes framed the recommendations: feasibility, flexibility, configurability and scalability. That gave every recommendation the same test to pass.

What we built

TThe discovery produced a set of findings, each with a recommendation rated high or medium impact. The high-impact recommendations pointed in three directions:

• Integration around the shop, so platforms and warehouse systems share data through one route
• Automation for work done by hand, including bulk orders, partner onboarding and returns, plus a shop the team could update without outside developers
• Closer links with third-party warehouses, for up-to-date stock and order status and shipping rules that vary by country

Box UK also set out a phased plan for acting on them, starting with foundations and a proof of concept for warehouse integration before any platform migration. That plan, and the finding behind it, is what Just Eat Takeaway took to its suppliers.

The outcome

JJust Eat Takeaway used the findings to refine its brief to suppliers. The original brief centred on the webshop. With most orders coming through other routes, the refined version gave more weight to automation, integration and warehouse data.

That meant suppliers would respond to the problem discovery had found. Just Eat Takeaway also had a ranked set of recommendations and a phased plan to judge their proposals against.

Frequently asked questions