Deutsche Bahn’s community of citizen developers drives innovation at scale with Power Platform

Deutsche Bahn (DB) is Germany’s national railway company and a global leader in transportation and logistics, with over 300,000 employees worldwide. Serving millions of passengers daily, DB operates one of Europe’s largest rail networks, including its high-speed ICE trains connecting major cities across the continent. In freight and logistics, DB Cargo and DB Schenker manage extensive operations, moving goods efficiently worldwide.

In support of its digital transformation goals, DB set out to accelerate innovation in business applications. After equipping its professional developers with the low-code tools of Microsoft Power Platform, and with the support of its supervisory board, DB recently made these tools available to every employee in the company, creating a vibrant and fast-growing community of citizen developers.

“Before we used Power Platform, it was very expensive to develop new apps,” says Thomas Czierpke, Head of Microsoft 365 Adoption and Change Management, Microsoft 365, DB Group. “Now, we no longer require a professional developer and a lot of time. Each of our coworkers has a Power Platform license to create, to solve problems for his or her team, or even for the whole company. It’s very easy for them to make their own apps, and very fast.”

Governance at scale 

DB’s approach to building a citizen-developer program operates with a Center of Excellence (CoE) on two levels: centralized and localized. “We have a centralized Center of Excellence, which defines guidelines and standardizes common components and services across the company,” says Sakibou Tchagbele, who leads the Low-Code/No-Code Topic Team at DB Systel Architecture Guild and DB CoE Integration Area. “The local center of excellence is really focusing on implementation at the subsidiary level and includes the subsidiary CIO.” 

This approach ensures that governance is implemented all the way through to the local level. It also enables the citizen-developer program to scale without overwhelming Tchagbele and his team. “I don’t have to review every question from every citizen developer,” he explains, “only the ones that can’t be solved by the local experts.”

The CoE team used the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit as the foundation to develop their own governance features. To ensure consistency across apps, the team has provisioned various Power Apps templates with DB UX style guides. Both DB Citizen and Professional Developers use these templates as a starting point for their DB Power Apps development. 

To drive their strategy for governance at scale, DB has also been using Managed Environments since the capabilities were introduced in 2022. This includes capabilities such as customized welcome content that greets makers as soon as they sign into Power Apps. The content includes the latest internal policies for each environment. Additionally, environment groups enable admins to organize large numbers of environments into groups and apply specific rules across these groups. 

Innovative training 

DB employees have enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to build better solutions faster and drive innovation. 

When Czierpke made over 2,000 training sessions available last year, they were fully booked within just seven hours. He credits DB’s community approach for driving these levels of excitement. “I think that’s the key factor,” Czierpke asserts. “We have 11,000 people in the community attending workshops and showcases and other learning events, and now they all inspire and excite each other.” This Power Platform community is the third largest community within the Deutsche Bahn Group.

DB has also launched a groundbreaking training app aimed at organizing employee training across the company using the capabilities of the Power Platform, including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. This initiative represents the first organization-wide Power Platform use case approved by the Worker Council, marking a significant milestone for DB's IT department in fostering broader adoption of the platform.

Enterprise-ready solutions

Makers across the company are building apps that are driving significant business results. 

For example, an employee named Stephanie Schneider at DB Services GmbH built an app that digitizes the reporting process for the teams that clean the passenger trains. Shift logo data that was previously recorded on paper can now be entered directly in a mobile app built using Power Apps. The data is then compiled automatically, sent via email to managers through a scheduled Power Automate flow, and displayed on a Power BI dashboard which provides instant insights into performance.    

The app reduces errors due to poor handwriting from 20% to 2% and saves the shift managers approximately 70 minutes per shift. At three shifts per day, that’s 24 hours each week that shift managers can spend on important, onsite issues. The success of the app in one group has quickly led to interest from managers of other business areas. “My counterparts in other regions are testing the app now,” says Schneider. “The potential impact across the company is enormous.”

In another area of the company, an app was created to streamline processes related to track maintenance. This is a complex process, including the gathering and analysis of photographic evidence and measurement data. DB achieved this in the past by sending out workers equipped with cameras and paper notebooks. Images and data were then moved manually into folders and Excel files. 

“This was necessary work, but not the main work of those employees,” says DB InfraGO employee Christoph Schmitz, who built a mobile app that digitized the entire process. Simply by pressing the save button on the app, data is transferred to a Dataverse table and the images captured on the phone are transferred to a SharePoint folder. With the offline mode in Power Apps, data can also be collected without network reception and uploaded when the device is back online. 

Like Schneider’s reporting app, Schmitz’s app drastically reduces errors and saves enormous amounts of time. “So far, we have recorded 8,440 targets and saved three minutes each,” he says proudly. “That’s 56 days we’ve given back to the team.”

The future of DB’s citizen-developer program appears to be on track, with interest and enthusiasm growing every day. As Tchagbele says, “With our Center of Excellence and local teams of experts, we’re enabling both citizen developers and professional developers across company build effective, enterprise-level applications with Power Platform.”