Rubén del Fresno, Sales Project Manager, has spent eight years building automation at Just Eat Spain. His latest system earned him a July monthly Zappy Award: it moves a restaurant partner (partner) from signed to online across Sales, Operations, delivery and logistics, and account management—cutting time to online from 13 days to about 5.
Before Rubén built it, each team had to find the partner record, check a dashboard, and copy information into the next step.
The five-team handoff
The problem started when the team found that some partners were technically live but not actually ready. A seller could sign a new partner, get the listing built, and have delivery set up, but the final account manager check might still be incomplete. Teams worked from Salesforce dashboards and copied information into the next system themselves. A partner could wait while someone internally figured out who owned the next step.
“In the past, some of the teams worked with Salesforce, so they could see it, but it was so manual, and other team members might not have the same access,” Rubén says. “They'd have to get in, find the partner, see it on the dashboard.”
He began building the workflow from the handoff itself.
A system that catches problems before partners go live
When a seller marks a partner as signed in Salesforce, a Zap sends the details to Operations to create the listing. Completing that task sends the next assignment to the delivery and logistics team. Once those checks are complete, the automation routes the partner to an account manager.
That final route varies by partner. The system is built to recognize and operationalize those differences to ensure effective hand-offs. For example, a standard account in Madrid can be assigned to one person, while a top partner in Madrid can be assigned to another. The same is true regionally, as there would be a different path for a partner in Barcelona.
The system also knows when to stop. If an onboarding issue appears, the relevant Zap sends a targeted message to the seller, account manager, Operations, or more than one team if required. The partner doesn't continue through the process until the issue is resolved.
“With Zapier, the full team now has confidence that everyone has the information they need in under a minute,” Rubén says.
The metrics behind the build
Speed and confidence matter because the workflow tracks the metric Just Eat Spain cares about most: time to online. Before the system, a partner took about 13 days to move from signed to live. Now the process takes about 5 days—more than 60% faster.
The automation also changes the daily work for Operations. Rubén estimates it saves about 15 hours per person each week by removing duplicate data entry, copy-and-paste work, and manual reporting. The team can enter information once and rely on the workflow to deliver it where it needs to go.
The work now reaches beyond partner onboarding. Javier Martínez, Partner Acquisition Manager, sees the impact on the team's daily operating model: "By implementing Zapier to integrate our tools, we have significantly streamlined our internal processes. This has reduced administrative task volume and manual processing time, directly boosting overall team productivity."
That includes automated workflows for purchase order management and deposit handling, deal closures that improve pipeline control and forecasting, and Salesforce field population that speeds data entry and reduces human error. Teams also have better visibility into changes that affect workload and resource distribution.
Rubén didn’t start with a plan to build a company-wide system. Eight years ago, he and a colleague began with small processes in Spain. They wanted to prove that teams could solve specific problems without waiting for a long development cycle.
From an experiment in Spain to a European playbook
The results drew attention. Other Just Eat markets began asking how Spain was moving faster, and Rubén started sharing the model with colleagues in Italy, the UK, Ireland, and beyond. Each market operates its own account, but Rubén has become a go-to builder for the questions that come with connecting Salesforce, email, and internal tools into a working process.
Where AI fits now
He still builds new Zap workflows as problems arise and continues to improve the business-critical workflows he already runs. He recently added AI steps to reformat information, identify duplicate Salesforce opportunities, clean fields, and add logic where a manual process previously led to mistakes.
For Rubén, the point of those additions is not AI for its own sake. It is reliable data before the next team acts.
“AI is helping me improve the workflows we already depend on: cleaning Salesforce data, spotting duplicate records, and applying the logic that used to rely on manual checks.”
That is why the system now has a place in Just Eat Spain's operating rhythm. Finance recently asked Rubén to forecast future Zapier usage, not because the team was considering turning it off, but because the workflows have become part of how the business moves quickly.
