Onboard Retail Solutions expands rail network with new Cremonini deal for Spain
Onboard Retail Solutions, has dramatically expanded its Spanish on-rail services thanks to a new agreement between its customer Cremonini Rail Iberica and Renfe. CRI, thanks to it strong know-how and the long experience in the on board catering market in Europe, was awarded the four year contract to provide all onboard catering and logistics services for the Renfe rail network in Spain at the end of 2009 and is using Onboard for all its POS technology.
The new agreement has shown how fast moving and flexible Onboard can be. 'Renfe awarded the contract in October 2009 and the system had to be up and running by December 1, 2009,? says Onboard's CEO Thomas Drohan. 'We were given just five weeks to deliver the onboard EPOS and back-office solutions required.'
The EPOS system being used provides CRI with the perfect solution for selling all catering and associated goods onboard. The back office allows complete control over the operation enabling CRI to run all types of promotions using Onboard's onPromotion software, pay commission to crew, run all their sales reports, analyse consumption onboard, automate the processing and settling of credit cards etc . GPRS technology is used to communicate all the sales data to head office.
'Training, installation, configuration, deployment and integration all happened within the five week timeframe, which was quite an undertaking,' continues Drohan. 'However, the beauty of Onboard is that we are geared up to fast turn-rounds such as this without losing the ability to custom-build a package for each customer.'
Says Eric Delaroue (Cremonini Rail Iberica Managing Director:'In spite of the tight timescales, we were confident that Onboard could provide us with the necessary EPOS technology to ensure that we were able to sell onboard from day one and keep our passengers happy. We are looking forward to working with Onboard during 2010 to extend our solution onboard for Renfe.'
With this new agreement, Onboard now has deployments throughout the Cremonini Group, on the English Eurostar trains connecting London, Paris and Brussels through the Eurotunnel, on the Belgian Thalys trains on the Brussels, Paris, Cologne, Dusseldorf and Amsterdam routes and now in Spain onboard Renfe. 'We now have a very strong relationship with the Cremonini Group, one of most important player in Europe in the food and catering industries, and this latest agreement with CRI significantly strengthens Onboard's position within the rail sector,' says Drohan. 'Our rail business is growing fast within the UK and Europe with more announcements to be made in the coming months; all of which we are confident will place Onboard Retail Solutions at the forefront of onrail POS technology.'
