No More Queues to Get a Train Ticket – On the 1st of June 2009, at midnight, the pilot phase of Egyptian National Railway (ENR) Ticketing Application was launched in Cairo railways station

     By the end of last February 2009 eT3 started another new challenging project consisting of automates ticket process for trains without reservation at the Egyptian National Railways known as ENR.

With its 158 years of existence, the Egyptian National Railways is considered to be the second eldest railways in the world after the British Railways. Trains without reservations represent over 90% of trains’ traffic over the Egyptian territory serving more than 2 million passengers on a daily basis.

The real challenge of the project was to implement a quick win solution, easy to use by ENR’s cashiers, and using a limited budget.

    eT3, after performing a basic requirements’ analysis, defined automation requirements, ENR’s ticketing automation as appearing on the following picture, will require a solution based on touch POS technology, running an Arabic readymade retail package, using leased lines or GPRS connectivity as a backup to link railways stations to a centralized data center responsible on one hand to consolidate financial results of ENR’s railways stations and on the other hand broadcast the new prices and trains items to be sold on the railways stations, the whole solution should take a phase approach as the number of ENR’s railways stations is more than 900 stations, finally the application and basic platform should be centrally managed in ENR’s Cairo head office 

eT3 after surveying international and domestic applications’ market decided to adopt Microsoft Retail Management System, most commonly known as RMS, for the following reasons: –

• RMS is an international retail package, widely implemented in a lot of countries, and supporting small medium and large retail operations.
• RMS can run over any POS’s brand.
• RR-Touch RMS’s user interface is a native Arabic touch interface.
• RMS fully supports Head Quarter operations, as well as POS operations on cashier level in addition to a special Head cashier module for station’s back office.
• RMS fully supports Arabic in all its three modules.
• RMS is equipped with a complete flexible report manager capable of generating all different reports required by ENR at head office or station levels.

The typical solution architecture was designed taking into considerations to cover head office as well as small, medium, and large railways stations as appearing in the following picture:

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