Bayernwerk partners with DXC on a platform solution for an experience-driven work environment

Located in the south German state of Bavaria, energy company Bayernwerk provides utility services to various regions in the country. As a result of its digital business transformation, Bayernwerk is at the forefront of the transition to smart and sustainable energy distribution and services and is collaborating with Bavarian businesses, cities and municipalities to digitalize and modernize energy systems. 

Challenge

Bayernwerk wants its own workforce to harness all the opportunities digitalization provides to continue to foster operational excellence at the company. Improving employees’ work experience through the use of digital technologies and digitized processes is critical to improving the customer experience in the energy marketplace. 

Solution

To that end, Bayernwerk joined forces with DXC’s digital technologists and engineers to strategize and incubate a platform solution that would deliver persona-based, end-to-end business processes for Bayernwerk’s employees using new digital technologies. DXC’s Analytics and Engineering offering focuses on delivering a human-centered design approach that enables companies to gain deep insights that support Bayernwerk’s goal to improve the employee experience.

The joint Bayernwerk and DXC team kicked off the project by reviewing Bayernwerk’s initial design concepts and listening to target employee user groups to understand their expectations. From here the first user journeys were defined in detail and the UX/UI designs were extended and enhanced. A scalable base architecture was quickly established and a development team assembled to rapidly develop and deploy a minimum viable product (MVP) to integrate a broad range of business applications and digital tools onto the platform.

Disparate analogue processes and information are now rationalized and integrated into streamlined, executable experiences that simplify Bayernwerk’s employees’ daily activities. Early adopters were able to get their hands on the first version of “meinBayernwerk – your digital assistant” just 12 weeks after project inception. They provided valuable feedback on their experiences to help establish the future roadmap for the platform.

After receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback, the project moved to the next phase. Over the next few months, meinBayernwerk was enriched with new features and functionality; the user base was extended; and the first full-production release was deployed. From this solid foundation, Bayernwerk was able to leverage its flexible, multi-tenancy-ready architecture to onboard to the platform another business partner within the E.ON corporation, of which it is a subsidiary. This allowed the partner to start a similar journey with its own early-adopter user group.

Results

Bayernwerk’s employees are discovering the latest productivity-enhancing digital tools by navigating views in meinBayernwerk that are tailored to both their role and individual needs. They’re finding regulatory information at hand, right where they need it, as they work through their daily tasks.

When regulatory changes come into effect overnight, an app is updated; a safety notice is issued; a customer center number changes; the updates are reflected in the relevant processes; and those whose roles are impacted are instantly aware, easing the burden on application and process owners alike.

Team leads are commenting on how this integration of processes, tools and information helps to bring new hires up-to-speed more rapidly. Instead of being hit with a barrage of information from various sources, new employees can use the meinBayernwerk digital assistant to guide them. 

meinBayernwerk provides these advantages:

• Executable processes are integrated with the latest digital tools and information for Bayernwerk employees.
• Employees have increased awareness of and availability to digital tools across Bayernwerk’s energy business.
• Employees’ digital experiences are simplified by having single sign-on capabilities, and by deep links that are embedded across processes, applications and data.
• The streamlined approach to knowledge acquisition supports personnel growth. 

What’s next

Several E.ON companies are interested in adopting the platform, which will be facilitated by a straightforward tenant onboarding procedure. meinBayernwerk’s admin interface will further simplify this upscaling, and make it easy for process and application owners to integrate their processes and associated apps, as well as communicate with their end-user community. They will be able to publish changes that instantly reach all their members and directly harvest responses from them that can feed further enhancements to the platform.

The platform’s role-based model allows Bayernwerk to rapidly onboard other worker types, efficiently plugging the segmented processes of their individual user journeys into the wider context of various end-to-end business processes. This allows meinBayernwerk to become the digital home for all employees. This also will accelerate the company’s evolution towards a digitally mature, experience-driven employee work environment, underpinned by a modern, integrated, cloud-based application and infrastructure architecture that brings empowering digital experiences to the forefront.

The meinBayernwerk digital assistant has paved the way both for further improvements to the employee experience, and for onboarding other business applications and digital tools to the platform, as needed.

“With DXC’s vast know-how in digital engineering and our expertise in the energy sector, we were able to jointly build a product that revolutionizes the way our colleagues are dealing within our digital world,” says Lukas Schmidt, meinBayernwerk product owner at Bayernwerk. “We really built a new digital home for our colleagues, making their lives easier. DXC played a crucial role in fulfilling that vision, by supporting us with a brilliant engineering team.”