01.05.06
National Reservations Service wins IT award
The Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) National Reservations Service (NRS) was awarded the Information Technology award for 2005 at the HSBC Rail Business Awards. The award honours innovation and personal ingenuity across all sectors of the rail industry, recognising the excellence, professionalism and innovation across twelve categories.
The NRS allows, operated by Rail Settlement Plan Ltd. (RSP) is central to train operating companies’ (TOC) retail strategies and delivery. It drives their yield management systems and enables 1.5 billion journey enquiries per annum through face to face, call centre and web channels. It has the capacity to handle 500 transactions per second.
NRS allows rail passengers to make booking enquiries and to buy and reserve seats using a range of prices including discounted and promotional activities controlled by the train operators according to their demand or marketing profiles.
The National Reservations Service is a recently introduced £98 million state-of-the-art train booking system, delivered by ATOC on time and within budget. It is the first centrally-run system development and implementation since rail privatisation to involve all National Rail passenger train companies and all of the rail industry’s major IT suppliers, including Capgemini, Fujitsu, Atos Origin, Thales, iBlocks and Global Crossing.
Anthony Lain, Rail Settlement Plan Chief Executive, said, “The awards are a recognition of the excellent cooperation and collaboration between train operators and ATOC’s Rail Settlement Plan, and all the suppliers in delivering this highly complex IT system. Delivery to specification, time and budget is a very rare achievement in IT systems of this size and complexity but we have done it.
“This brings the total computer and rail industry awards gained by Rail Settlement Plan over the two years to six and is a remarkable achievement of which the RSP team, train operators and our suppliers can be justifiably proud.”
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