Providing accessible green energy for a better tomorrow

Overcoming operational hurdles to support clean energy

As a leader in Europe’s clean energy transition, E.ON is committed to making “new energy” work. Yet E.ON was under pressure to maintain the efficiency of their internal operations while supporting their ambitious sustainability goals. The company’s vision for improvement was focused on improving electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure management. With a growing network of public ChargePoint operators, E.ON identified an opportunity to modernize their contract management processes. By implementing advanced solutions for tracking pricing, tariffs and other critical information, the company would be better positioned to scale their EV charging network and meet evolving business demands with increased efficiency and precision.

E.ON’s health and safety team was responsible for managing the well-being of workers maintaining power grids — many of whom can be exposed to hazardous, high-voltage electricity. Lukas Heidegger, Senior Data and MLOps Engineer at E.ON, explained, “Working with high-voltage electricity is inherently dangerous. The lack of real-time data insights makes it difficult to prevent field incidents proactively. Our goal is for everyone to come home safe and healthy each day, but without better tools, it was challenging to implement preventive measures.” Given the critical nature of E.ON’s work, the need for real-time data analysis and predictive insights was paramount to minimizing incidents and improving overall safety in the field.

As E.ON continued to grow and modernize their operations, they recognized the need for a solution to expedite workflows, ensure accuracy and safeguard both employees and service quality. Turning to Databricks Apps, E.ON found the tools necessary to enable their mission of driving sustainable energy across their expanding network.

Streamlining contract management and more with Databricks Apps

E.ON turned to Databricks Apps — which enables data developers to quickly build production-ready and secure internal applications on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform — to modernize their operations and address several pressing challenges. With Databricks Apps, E.ON could easily access production-ready frameworks and automated governance without requiring extensive IT oversight.

Databricks Apps streamlined E.ON’s contract management processes, particularly for their EV infrastructure. E.ON developed a GenAI application to help process and extract essential contract details such as pricing, tariffs and other vital information. The application allows employees to quickly search and analyze contracts using natural language queries, eliminating the need for manual reviews and reducing the risk of missing key details. With all contract data stored in Databricks and processed through a centralized GenAI app, E.ON’s contract management team was able to react swiftly to frequent contract changes and improve decision-making and operational efficiency.

Beyond contract management, safety remained a top priority for E.ON’s teams working in hazardous environments to maintain power grids. Using Databricks Apps, E.ON developed interactive dashboards that allowed the Health and Safety team to monitor real-time incident data and extract actionable insights. These dashboards — enriched with visualizations of maps of incident locations, weather conditions and more — helped the team identify patterns, mitigate risks and implement preventative measures more successfully.

By integrating data and models directly within the Databricks Platform, E.ON avoided the complexities and inefficiencies of moving data between disparate systems, which had previously caused delays for their teams. Heidegger clarified, “For us, Databricks is not just about developing applications quickly — it’s about having the flexibility to work with data and models in one platform, without the need for moving data between different systems.” With Databricks Apps, E.ON could deploy production-ready dashboards faster and more efficiently, benefiting from built-in governance, automated access controls and secure data management.

Faster deployments lead to smarter and safer operations

With the implementation of Databricks Apps, E.ON significantly accelerated the speed of deploying internal applications. “We reduced application deployment time to just one to two minutes, allowing teams to focus on higher-value initiatives instead of wasting hours on infrastructure setups,” explained Heidegger. This increased agility has transformed operations across departments, including contract management and safety, enabling faster adaptation to the company’s evolving sustainability goals. Now, with 1,500 employees relying on Databricks for dashboards and insights, decision-making has become more efficient, and productivity has seen a noticeable improvement across multiple departments.

Even more importantly, Databricks Apps has improved E.ON’s health and safety operations by enabling real-time insights into field incidents. The interactive dashboards created through the feature have allowed the safety team to proactively monitor data and identify patterns to address risks before they happen. With such comprehensive visualizations, E.ON has implemented more targeted preventive measures, reducing risks in high-voltage areas and enhancing the safety of employees maintaining the power grids.

Moreover, the successful deployment of Databricks Apps simplified operational and supplier management, eliminating the need for separate front-end setups. For example, E.ON is working on analyzing 500–600 public ChargePoint contracts through their GenAI-powered application, streamlining contract management for their EV infrastructure. Now, E.ON is exploring the use of Databricks Apps to host microservices that interact with critical business applications through APIs, hoping to further improve operations and incident management. A desired feature for future deployments includes user visibility, which would allow E.ON to track who is using the app and personalize the experience for different user groups, especially in global deployments with region-specific data. With these advancements and the reduced operational load on IT, E.ON’s data teams can focus on high-value projects, furthering the company’s mission to provide clean energy across Europe.