Alin Sirbu has been with Retail inMotion for 11 years. For RiM – that’s a very long time and actually makes him the employee with the longest tenure on our IT team! Over the more-than-a-decade that Alin has been at RiM, his focus has been set on one of our key drivers as a company – innovation. That means that Alin helps us drive continuous improvement, new product rollouts and general customer support.
We sat down with Alin to learn more about how innovation is at the heart of what we’ve been doing for the past 11 years.
Alin, how important would you say that innovation is at RiM?
Alin Sirbu: Innovation is core at RiM. It’s what made us and put us on the map 10 years ago and turned us into the people-to-beat in our industry. We’ve gone from a company that didn’t even exist before 2007 to become the leading provider of point-of-sale and inflight management applications for airlines. We are constantly looking at the leading edge of technology, working on improving processes and functionality with an eye on staying ahead of the changes in the airline industry. As a matter of fact, we work on applications that we have not even been asked to create yet. So, we are always pushing the envelope for our clients.
In 2012, Retail inMotion supported a major customer in the USA in deploying an Android-based mobile ePOS solution. RiM engineered and supplied 30,000 devices to the airline, which were capable of seat map and crew scheduling integration and consolidated card payment capabilities.
How have you personally been involved in promoting innovation?
We are constantly changing and introducing new functionality, and there are a lot of cool things we have delivered. But if I had to pick one thing that stands above the rest it would have to be the system that we delivered to a major US customer of ours back in 2011. The idea and the whole process involved in that was breakthrough innovation at the time. When I started with this company, the airlines where still using those bulky PDAs to conduct transactions onboard. But around 2010, Androids and IPhones were fairly new and immature. Nevertheless, we determined that the old devices were basically dead. It was a gamble at the time for a small company like ours, but we began the process of building a point-of-sale system with Android phones for our customer. That was something that had never been done before.
And the result?
It took about a year of working closely with the airline. In the end, we delivered the ePOS that they are still using today. So, the whole idea of bringing the commercial device into a smartphone was a huge innovation back then. It actually made Retail inMotion what we are today.
