Most people associate DHL with logistics, and few are aware of the fact that DHL ESS team develops Enterprise Software Solutions. What is even more interesting is that DHL Freight opted to base its first and only R&D team in Sofia, Bulgaria.
" DHL ESS plays a fundamental role in the Freight Transformation program, aiming at harmonize the existing operational, financial and reporting processes and replace the legacy systems with state-of-the art standards operating procedures and technology. Our recently established DHL ESS team is an essential part of our Transformation agenda and plays a pivotal role in the success of our company. It is great to see our young and dynamic team in Bulgaria and their engagement. We are therefore expanding the DHL ESS presence also in Prague and I am convinced this will strengthen our ESS team and will accelerate the success of our Transformation program”, says Stefano Arganese, Chief Digital Officer DHL Freight.
Formed three years ago, the DHL ESS team works on a major strategic project within DHL Freight that aims to coordinate the existing operational, financial and reporting processes and replace the legacy systems with revolutionary operating procedures and technology.
The new system infrastructure will facilitate and accelerate workflows handling millions of shipments every year, ensuring:
• higher transparency
• high level of data/document automation
• increased efficiency
Since the beginning, the team has been involved not only in the pure implementation of the business logic and technological evolution of the system but the overall organization around the project and the design of the business processes into the application. DHL ESSs use an evolutionary lean process that enables team members to improve in all aspects – from cross-functional collaboration and organization, through the development process and enhancement of the DevOps pipeline, e.g. with containerization. The ultimate goal is full digitalization of the transport business of DHL Freight in Europe.
Ivelin Ivanov, Director of Development at DHL Enterprise Software Solutions, added:
“In the last years we have been working entirely on TMS and can show great results already. The system operates in France, and from the beginning of 2020, also in Turkey. In our project pipeline are all other DHL Freight countries that will be launched over the next three years. Since 2017, the DHL ESS team has grown 6 times. It is expected to increase by more 40%, mostly Java developers, as well as experts dealing with QA Automation.
It comes as no surprise that DHL ESS attracts top talent.
Joining DHL ESS is seen as an opportunity to take part in a world-class strategic project with high stakes, which is geared towards the long-term strategy, sustainability and the transformation of the leading logistics provider.
The team develops Java Enterprise solutions with large bandwidth (data processing and data transfer), data reliability and security, 3rd party integration and impact on the full life cycle of a supply chain system. It’s an exciting fact that DHL ESS team members receive requirements directly from key users of the product, thus ensuring proper fulfillment of the company’s objectives.
DHL ESS team prides itself with:
- Design and build - Design and implement new features and enhance existing functionalities according to business specifications.
- Coding standards - Ensure that your code meets software development and quality standards and fits into the continuous release process.
- Solving hard problems - Optimize the application to support work with large amounts of data.
- Ownership - Participate in the whole sprint process for product development.
- Mentorship - Deep dive into the project with the support of our professional developers.
So far, DHL ESS team has several successful go-lives and the next step will be a series of rollouts all over Europe.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE PART OF THE DHL ESS TEAM?
Candidates must be proud of their code and be willing to take pride in developing, extending and maintaining it. DHL ESS offers excellent initial training that will introduce talented candidates to the business as well as DHL’s technical paradigm. Constant communication between various teams is the norm, and they help each other a lot.
DHL ESS is looking for people who are not afraid to extend the code hierarchy of a method and to see 20+ calls; people who won’t be afraid of refactoring legacy code when they feel that the time has come and the ones that will take the responsibility for every regression that this will lead to.
No matter how cliché it may sound, we insist on using clean code. From the implementation of tailor-made design patterns to using as informative as possible naming conventions and reducing and optimizing logic compositions and algorithms. Our data model is pretty complex and requires a lot of debugging. Some tables have over one hundred foreign keys and we often use denormalization.
We would appreciate it if you are comfortable with self-referring tables, joins case/when expressions, triple unions, window functions, subqueries, and others.