Mobile Workforce Management for Utilities: How EWE NETZ Modernized Field Operations
The energy transition is rewriting the job description of every distribution network operator in Europe. Grids are expanding, renewable connections are multiplying, and regulation keeps adding to the volume and complexity of work in the field. At the same time, a generation of experienced technicians is heading into retirement — taking decades of hard-won knowledge with them.
That combination puts mobile workforce management for utilities under real strain: more to coordinate, with fewer experienced hands to coordinate it. EWE NETZ, one of Germany’s largest distribution network operators, decided to meet the challenge head-on — and shared the story with us in a candid conversation.
Mobile workforce management (MWM) software is the category built for exactly this: tools that schedule, dispatch and equip field technicians in real time, from the back office to the device in their hand. For a multi-utility operator, getting it right is the difference between coping and scaling — and that is what EWE NETZ set out to do.
A multi-utility operation under mounting pressure
EWE NETZ runs critical infrastructure across northern Germany: gas, electricity, heating and water networks spanning more than 100,000 km, with over 2,000 employees and 650 dedicated field staff. Telecommunications is on the way too. Coordinating qualified people across that footprint is a daily exercise in complexity.
For years, much of that coordination rested on experience. Local teams assigned work based on what they knew. With complexity rising and the workforce changing, the limits of that approach were becoming impossible to ignore.
“Business complexity is rising significantly” explained Andreas Nyhof, who heads production control and leads EWE NETZ’s Operational Excellence programme. New legislation, the skills shortage, and a patchwork of systems were converging at once — and the existing toolset simply couldn’t scale to what lay ahead.
Rethinking mobile workforce management as a transformation project
What stands out about EWE NETZ’s approach is that they didn’t run a typical software procurement. They ran a transformation project.
Field staff, office personnel, and colleagues from asset management, asset support and IT were brought together in structured eight-week sprints to define what they actually needed — making sure the eventual platform would serve the people using it every day, in the office and in the field.
“We decided quite early on to approach this process in close collaboration with our employees” said Ole Flörcken, who leads business unit development and owns the company’s digitalization agenda. That employee-first stance shaped both the requirements and, later, the rollout.
Three non-negotiables
Out of those sprints came three criteria that drove the decision to partner with OverIT.
- First, the platform had to represent genuine best practice — not a digitized version of old workflows, but a step-change in how field operations are planned and executed across a multi-utility environment.
- Second, the partner had to be future-oriented, with both a strong roadmap and the mindset to co-develop. “They already have a lot in the works” Flörcken noted, “but they also have the right mindset to work with us“.
- Third — and for an infrastructure operator, this is everything — reliability and quality were non-negotiable. With 650 field staff depending on the system every day, there was no room for failure.
EWE NETZ has since deployed the OverIT NextGen Platform — the mobile workforce management software now underpinning its field operations — replacing experience-dependent manual dispatch with structured, data-driven workflows: real-time scheduling and dispatch visibility, mobile-first field execution, and a single system of record across its networks.
A partnership “on equal footing”
EWE NETZ is open about where they are: the rollout is recent, and they’re early in the journey. What they’re confident about is the working relationship.
“It’s always been great, always on equal footing, always with a shared goal in mind” said Nyhof, describing tough but constructive conversations about cost and timelines. “And for me, that’s an essential part of partnership“. He also pointed to fast response times when issues arise — critical in the early, sensitive phase of any rollout.
That partnership extends to the people most affected by the change. EWE NETZ ran intensive change management across more than 600 field colleagues — committees, active stakeholder involvement, and feedback loops that ran from senior management to the technician starting a shift the next morning.
The early operational signals are encouraging: a finer level of detail in dispatching, and workflows already adapting to plan work more precisely. The bigger efficiency gains — route optimization, easier back-office scheduling — are what the team expects to see as the rollout matures over the coming year.
Advice for utilities facing the same crossroads
Asked what he’d tell other European utilities wrestling with the same pressures, Flörcken offered a simple, ordered playbook:
- Be clear from the start about your framework and red lines, and define them explicitly.
- Then move step by step — sort out the processes first, then the organisation, then bring in the software that ties the two together.
- Give it the time real change needs. Even done ambitiously, transformation has to be anchored in the company.
It’s a useful reminder that platforms don’t transform operations on their own. Process, organisation and technology have to move together — and a multi-utility operator’s guiding principle captures the goal neatly: the right employee, with the right skill, with the right tool, in the right place, at the right time.
Where this goes next
EWE NETZ’s story is still being written, and that’s rather the point. They’ve built the foundation — workforce acceptance, a modern platform, a partner committed to co-developing what comes next — and set themselves up for the efficiencies the energy transition will demand.
You can watch the full conversation with Ole Flörcken and Andreas Nyhof, and see how the OverIT NextGen Platform supports mobile workforce management for utilities at scale.