ANS and Network Rail Make Power Platform a Value-driving Solution
Watch the Network Rail Customer Success Video
Background
Network Rail owns, operates, maintains and develops the railway infrastructure in England, Scotland and Wales – 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and the thousands of signals, level crossings and stations – and manages 20 of the country’s largest stations.
Challenge
As part of its Digital Factory programme, Network Rail had built a Power Platform estate comprises 9,500 power apps and 21,000 cloud flows. However, these were all the result of tactical usage of Power Platform, in which Business Makers across the organisation built low-code solutions to digitise paper-based processes as well as streamline and automate tasks. In order to solidify Power Platform as a more strategic solution, Network Rail wanted to gain a bird’s-eye view of the value the entire Power Platform estate was delivering, as well as facilitate more robust best practice around Power Platform for its Business Makers.
Solution
Network Rail chose to work with ANS based on our prominence in the Microsoft Power Platform community and the significant number of Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), that we have, particularly in Microsoft Business Applications.
ANS built a Solution Registration Tool in Power Platform, where everyone at Network Rail who had developed an app or flow could register it as a solution and catalogue the value and return the solution delivered to the organisation. ANS also provided knowledge transfer to Network Rail’s dedicated Power Platform team in the form of workshops and daily shadowing opportunities.
Outcomes
As a result of the Solution Registration Tool, Network Rail now has a high-level overview of all the individual Power Platform apps and flows across its estate, why they were built and why, as well as the value or return they provide. Armed with this tool, Network Rail is now working with ANS to look at the regional and organisational Return on Investment of Power Platform. At a conservative estimate, if one Power App delivers £1,000 of benefit, then the entire estate provides just over £9m of return per year.