Network Rail empowers over 2,500 makers to build innovative business solutions with Power Platform and Copilot Studio

Network Rail is the backbone of the UK’s railway infrastructure, responsible for maintaining over 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, and 20 of the country’s largest stations across England, Scotland, and Wales. With a workforce exceeding 40,000, Network Rail’s mission is clear: Everyone home safe every day. This commitment to safety, reliability, and modernization drives the organization’s digital transformation journey.

Microsoft Power Platform is a key part of that transformation. Since 2019, Network Rail has embraced low-code development to digitize processes, empower frontline workers, and foster a culture of innovation. Today, the organization boasts almost 11,000 Power Apps applications, making it one of the top 20 Power Apps users in the UK and among the top 250 enterprise users in the world. Network Rail has also developed over 28,000 Power Automate cloud flows as well as a rapidly growing number of AI-driven agents built with Copilot Studio. 

A community of over 2,200 makers drives Power Platform development at Network Rail. Over 90% of these makers operate outside traditional IT roles, including engineers, project managers, and legal teams. “Our employees know the business better than anyone,” says James Connelly, Power Platform Lead at Network Rail. “Empowering these employees to address their own business challenges with Power Platform just makes good business sense.” 

Mission critical applications

One of the most important solutions to come out of the Power Platform community at Network Rail has been an innovative solution for safety reporting. This end-to-end system replaces legacy paper-based processes, enhances data quality, and accelerates response times—critical for an organization where safety is paramount.

“Before we really explored Power Platform, we originally built our safety reporting app on a different low code platform. Using Power Platform and other Microsoft products, we were able to build a more complete solution, from reporting to issue resolution,” says Connelly. 

An app deployed to all employees enables rapid reporting of potential safety hazards (“close calls”) such as a trespassing incident. Offline functionality through Dataverse ensures accessibility in remote locations. Flows in Power Automate provide notifications and reminders. Managers resolve issues reported in a separate app. The solution also supports reporting by external contactors via a Power Pages portal. A custom API is used for secure data sharing with an external rail standards board.

When deploying the application, Network Rail became one of the first organizations in the world to use the wrap feature in Power Apps and deploy to over 30,000 devices. With wrap, the company packaged the canvas app as a custom-branded iOS app for native distribution to mobile users via Intune. “Network Rail quickly saw the value of the wrap feature in Power Apps to its frontline employees and effectively realized that value,” says Ricardo Russ, Senior Business Process Lead at Microsoft who helped James Connelly and his team deploy wrap and other premium Power Platform features.  

Today, the app is used to report over 250,000 potential close call issues a year, contributing to safer operations across the network. Additionally, by streamlining the processes to report and manage incidents - and by eliminating reliance on third-party reporting tools - the app is saving Network Rail an estimated $2.1 million a year. 

Other apps are reporting equally impressive results. An app used for change requests to infrastructure projects, for example, has cut the time to raise a request from 2 hours per ticket to just 15 minutes. The app removes the risk of miscommunication with vendors executing the project while also reducing report preparation and the number of previously unreported changes. 

Governance at scale

As Power Platform development and adoption has grown, Network Rail recognized the need for robust governance to manage risk, ensure compliance, and maximize value. 

The central Power Platform team, led by Connelly and his technical team, and supported by a Center of Excellence (COE), implemented a multi-tiered governance model. The COE includes segregated environments for a default personal productivity, shared production, and enterprise-wide applications, each with tailored DevOps processes and oversight. 

A bespoke IT Service Management (ITSM) system built on Power Platform makes it easier to raise tickets for technical support. An AI agent built using Copilot Studio promotes self-service resolution. The agent is expected to resolve more than 80% of all tickets raised, enabling the support team to focus more on helping makers build solutions. If a ticket is required, users can set this up directly in the agent. The ticket is then surfaced for the support team in a Power Apps application. “I’m a big believer of leading by example and our AI support agent is just one more example of how we’re using Copilot Studio and Power Platform to build effective solutions that help us monitor, govern and drive adoption at huge scale.,” says Connelly.

A vibrant maker community provides strong, maker-to-maker support, further reducing reliance on the central team to answer basic, “how to” questions. Monthly community calls, lunch-and-learns, and an internal communication site foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. Makers meet to showcase their solutions, driving cross-functional innovation. Apprenticeship schemes have produced top developers, with former apprentices such as Ben Atherton now leading the pro-development side of the team. “Our pro developers are a true credit to not just the apprenticeship scheme, but to Network Rail,” says Connelly. 

To enhance Power Platform governance, for example, Connelly’s team is working on a registration system that helps ensure all apps and flows are cataloged, with owners reporting on business value, data sensitivity, and usage. The catalogue aims to promote the re-use of existing solutions, reduce duplication, and promote maker-to-maker networking on similar business problems. Even better, an AI agent is being added to the system using Copilot Studio that will enable makers to complete the process even faster using natural language. 

The company has also expanded its use of premium capabilities like Dataverse. “We like the out-of-the-box security model in Dataverse, including data retention and auditing controls, and the ability to create custom roles,” says Connelly. “Dataverse enables us to leverage our knowledge base more widely across more applications while also maintaining control.”  

Additionally, Managed Environments, part of Power Platform, provides the team with capabilities that help scale governance for thousands of apps and flows. This includes automated enforcement of app sharing limits, environment routing from default to productivity environments, maker welcome content, and solution quality checks. “With Managed Environments and our COE, we can govern thousands of solutions with a lean team, empowering makers while maintaining control and compliance,” says Connelly. 

Into the future with AI

With Power Platform and Copilot Studio, Network Rail is also at the forefront of integrating AI into its operations. One notable solution helps field workers capture readings more efficiently from gas and electricity meters. The solution leverages the OCR capabilities in AI Builder and replaces a previously manual paper-based process. The company expects to generate substantial savings with the solution through faster, more accurate readings. 

The company is also using AI-powered tools like plans in Power Apps and generative pages to accelerate solution development and expand the organization’s digital footprint. With plans, makers can simply describe a business use case, and Plans agents generate a complete Power Platform solution to meet that need. Generative pages enables makers to customize apps right down to specific UI elements – all using natural language. Both features benefitted from early feedback from customers like Network Rail. At a recent leadership conference, for example, these tools were used to develop a prototype to address a business problem in less than an hour. “With AI tools like Plans in Power Apps and generative pages, I can literally build a working prototype as the customer is describing it,” says Connelly. “What used to take days or weeks, can now be done in just a few hours - even minutes.” 

The technology is paying off. Network Rail is consistently seeing projects being completed ten times faster – an efficiency gain that’s expected to save significantly in development costs.  

Connelly and team are also hard at work on a rapid development program to deliver a new wave of AI agents using Copilot Studio across a number of different divisions. As Connelly says, “We’re demonstrating to senior leaders at Network Rail that, by working together with technical and industry experts and using tools like Copilot Studio, we’re able to deliver on our agentic vision on a very aggressive timeline.” 

It’s all part of a long track record of success at Network Rail with Power Platform. “As Power Platform continues to evolve, we’re going beyond just generating data and automating processes. AI tooling such as Copilot Studio is helping us identify trends and new opportunities for improvement across the business,” says Connelly. In this way, Power Platform is not only helping Network Rail meet its safety and reliability commitments but also achieve its broader goal of becoming a simpler, better and greener railway for their employees, suppliers, and customers.

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