Powered by data:
The E.ON journey tosustainable energy
Data readiness, metadata management, datagovernance and data modeling with erwin by QuestE.ON
Country: Germany
Employees: 72,000
Industry: Energy
Website: https://www.eon.com/en.html

The Challenge
As part of its digital transformation, growth andsustainability goals, E.ON was determined to achieve
better governance over its highly heterogenous
data landscape and leverage the data for maximum
impact. The sheer quantity of data inputs poses achallenge, with operations covering 13 European
countries and 72,000 employees. With sustainability
at the core of its mission, E.ON leverages 900,000
renewable energy plants with decentralized green
sources of energy through its Germany distribution
network. “We want to make a difference,” said
Romina Pyplacz, Global Head of Data Management
and Data Governance at E.ON. “We support ourE.ON is an international, privately owned
energy supplier based in Essen, Germany, withapproximately 72,000 employees and 51 million
customers – making it the largest energy provider
across Europe. With a clear focus on its corebusinesses, the company aims to become thepartner of choice for energy and customer solutions.
E.ON provides solutions for the new energy world
guided by key emerging energy trends includingtransforming yesterday’s power lines into tomorrow’s
smart energy networks and meeting the increasing
demand for innovative customer solutions.

ACHIEVEMENTS• Enabled efficient energy grid management• Ensured regulatory requirements were able to be
met with ease – reducing the risk of fines• Increased employee productivity and satisfaction• Improved customer service

customers in their decarbonization and also wantourselves to thrive and reduce our carbon footprint.”
With 51 million customers relying on E.ON throughout
the energy crisis, E.ON’s top priority is ensuring
energy continuity for its customers. “All of this is notpossible without digitalization,” said Pyplacz. “That’s
why we are digitizing and standardizing the entire
system – networks, products, customer interfaces
and internal processes, and making E.ON the first‘All Digital’ energy company.” E.ON needed to help
its data scientists and engineers improve theirdata knowledge, find the best data for use at thebest time and put the data in the most appropriate
business context. They needed visibility for andaccess to enterprise data from disparate ERP, CRM,BI, ticketing and service systems. In addition, datafrom one million smart energy meters also needs
to be processed to improve service, develop
incentives and enhance financial reporting.

The Solution
The company began its data readiness (DaRe)journey in 2018 after realizing that taking better
advantage of data and data intelligence would help
improve customer services, increase efficiency inenergy production and make it easier to meet theregulatory requirements of the countries whereE.ON operates. With E.ON’s data landscape beingenormously heterogeneous – including several
thousand applications where data is stored (SAP,Microsoft Azure, Oracle, old legacy Windows
servers and others) – the company needed data
intelligence software that could map as many data
sources as possible. The E.ON DaRe team spentmonths evaluating metadata management and data
governance capabilities to ensure they would selectthe right data intelligence software provider that could
help them not only kickstart their data journey, but be
integral in helping them achieve their long-term goals.
Guided by its vision, E.ON selected erwin by Quest
as its software provider. erwin Data Intelligence by
Quest was initially deployed for automated metadatamanagement, data lineage documentation andimpact analysis. With these capabilities, E.ON has
improved data quality, detected data redundancies

2and achieved IT efficiencies that were not originallyplanned for when first starting their data readinessjourney. “We use erwin for the auto-configuration ofdata pipelines,” said Pyplacz. “I did not imagine in2018 that I would use a data catalog to automaticallyconfigure data pipelines, but I can. I can do things
that I didn’t even think about when I got started.”
The E.ON DaRe team has used the data governanceand data literacy capabilities of erwin DataIntelligence to deliver a standardized, businessfocused data catalog to improve IT and businesscollaboration, as well as alignment. By defining andstandardizing common business metrics such asKPIs, and making associated data asset relationships
clearly visible within erwin Data Intelligence mindmaps, E.ON has been able to provide clarity forbusiness stakeholders.

“”Our purpose is to ensure
enterprise-wide deployment ofour data as a strategic asset.
Romina Pyplacz, Head of Data Management andGovernance, E.ON

Emboldened by the success of these initiatives,
E.ON expanded its erwin partnership with a focus
on data modeling harmonization by adopting erwin
Data Modeler by Quest, and began to explore theaddition of data quality, data provisioning and dataas-a service as key E.ON data readiness offerings.
In 2022, E.ON started development of its own data
provisioning platform, E.ON Data House, capitalizingon all of the learnings and tool efficiencies of theprevious years. This mission’s focus is utilizing E.ON’s
discovered best practices of data management withina platform that will ultimately serve as the foundation
for E.ON’s future.

E.ON’s DaRe team began as a team of only two E.ON
employees in 2018 but has expanded to include morethan 30 experts operating with 24 business units.
erwin by Quest is used by more than 600 E.ON users
today for data modeling, intelligence and governance.

The Results
erwin Data Intelligence has helped E.ON achieve its
goals of growth, sustainability and digitization. Various
subsidiaries now have more transparency into theirdata assets, provided by properly documented data
ownership and a commonly agreed-upon businesslanguage to describe data and separation of data
domains. This has enabled a paradigm shift fromapplication-centric to data-centric processes, arequirement to fuel the value of artificial intelligence(AI). Data scientists and AI professionals in particular
benefit from the transparency and the shorter “timeto data,” which, at the scale of E.ON, results in several
million euros of additional revenue from harnessing
the data. Company-wide benefits additionally include:• E.ON identified more than 2 million Euros inbusiness impact after 24 months. They have 67
systems connected across 4 countries with 24
business units using erwin Data Intelligence for data
governance.
• E.ON is rapidly scaling its metadata management
capabilities, with 44 data domains defined, over600 users trained and 550 business terms createdsince early 2019.
• E.ON is ensuring a common, compliant wayof working across all RUs and BUs, based onstandards, roles, policies and understanding.
Since 2019, they have developed 24 BUs withdata governance roles and announced 15 newleadership roles related to data governance.
• E.ON estimates a savings of 30 percent on external
data management costs and a 50 percent reduction
in time spent on data discovery because betterdata availability and quality have a direct impact on
productivity for each data-driven activity across theenterprise.

• By delivering “data governance as a service”
for one-stop data access and lineage, E.ON
has standardized its vocabulary, met regulatorycompliance requirements, and has been able tounderstand and then optimize how data is used
across global operations.

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Products• erwin Data Intelligence• erwin Data ModelerSolutions• Metadata Management• Data Governance“• Data Modeling

We use erwin for the autoconfiguration of data pipelines.
I did not imagine in 2018 thatI would use a data catalog toautomatically configure datapipelines, but I can. I can dothings that I didn’t even think
about when I got started.

”Romina Pyplacz, Head of Data Management andGovernance, E.ON

About Quest

Quest creates software solutions that make thebenefits of new technology real in an increasingly
complex IT landscape. From database and systems
management, to Active Directory and Microsoft 365
migration and management, and cybersecurity
resilience, Quest helps customers solve their next
IT challenge now. Quest Software. Where next
meets now.

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