Strong rail needs a strong digital partner

Article: Strong rail needs a strong digital partner

DB Systel GmbH, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, is a wholly owned subsidiary of DB AG and the digital partner for all Group companies.

Shaping successful digitalisation at Deutsche Bahn. This is what drives us.

Systematic digitalisation is of crucial importance to creating a strong rail system. In a joint undertaking with all of DB’s business units, we are working on the digitalisation of countless rail-related business processes and holistic digital solutions to create high-performance user features that deliver maximum customer value. We have established a comprehensive range of services that meet the highest IT standards and requirements for this purpose. We implement effective and efficient solutions that are based on platform and service technologies and innovations such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. As a partner for long-term undertakings, we contribute extensive rail and IT expertise and operate in a vendor-neutral way so that we can all reach our common goal. Around 5,400 people are currently employed at our main locations in Frankfurt, Berlin and Erfurt.

Going further, we want to anticipate common customer wishes and individual Group requirements while maintaining flexibility, so we carefully select first-class business partners who can support us. These strategic partnerships are crucial to our collective success.

Early recognition of market trends

Innovative ideas and promising solutions are always of great interest to us, so, in the search for new ways forward, we have our own business ventures and open data platforms, and we run Skydeck, DB Systel's in-house innovation lab. We are also active on the external market with selected services and products. We publish our digital trend radar once a year and support promising developments for future solutions. We evaluate and take up rapidly evolving digital technologies and trends such as digital twin, location technologies, future work, quantum computing, etc. and use industry-wide, interdisciplinary networks, which give us access to different skills, data, services and innovations. At the same time, we also support innovative in-house developments that have the real potential to benefit our operations and enhance the intelligence of the overall rail system.

DB Systel in the agile working environment

These dynamic developments are based on two core features: modern, flexible IT structures, and a new, active working environment with agile, independent teams. Making optimum use of these will enable us to transform conventional working and organisational structures into company-wide networks and autonomous ways of managing work and to support our Group partners with their increasingly variable requirements in the best possible way.