The challenge

Most digitalisation stories in the rail sector start with a painful legacy system. EVR’s begins with a blank sheet. The company launched in late 2025 as a new, cross-border railway undertaking. That is an advantage: there is no old software to untangle. But it is also a race. A young operator earns nothing until it can calculate a lane, create an offer, and send it to a customer.

The obvious shortcuts don’t work in the rail business. You can calculate in Excel, but everyone does it differently. Countless spreadsheets pile up, each with its own formulas and versions that no one can reconcile or keep consistent. The pipeline sits in a separate file. Customer notes are stuck in someone’s inbox. By the time everything is reconciled, the tender deadline has passed.

Generic CRM systems don’t solve it either. They were never built for block trains, single wagon load traffic, or multi-leg rail calculations. Locomotives, wagons, personnel, energy, traction, and tracks don’t fit into a generic field. Price from the gut and you lose your margin.

EVR needed a commercial backbone that already speaks the language of rail. And it needed it from day one.

“A new RU doesn’t have a year to build up its sales. With ROM it works from day one: customer database, sales pipeline, calculation, offer, so the team can focus on customers from the start and the company can grow.”

Dominik Fürste, Co-Founder, Rail-Flow

The solution

EVR went live with Rail-Flow’s Rail Offer Management, the rail-specific CRM and offer-management system of the Rail-Flow platform. ROM covers the entire sales process: opportunities and pipeline, customer master data, rail-specific calculation, offer documents, sending, and, once the customer accepts, handover to the Rail-Flow Transport Management System.

The ROM toolset:

• CRM and customer management: companies, contacts, notes, communication, and tasks in a rail-specific customer base.
• Opportunities and sales pipeline: stages, status, expected revenue, win probability, and clustering into key accounts and selling centers.
• Requests and PTM integration: tenders and requests from Rail-Flow PTM flow straight into the ROM pipeline, so no opportunity is lost.
• Offers by request type: block train, single wagon load, intermodal load unit, services, and asset rental, each with the right form and the full lifecycle.
• The calculation tool: stored cost rates for paths, personnel, locomotives, energy, and services, automatic splitting at country borders, overheads, risk, and margin, plus a sales price per train, per net tonne, or per wagon that flows straight into the offer.
• Offer documents and sending: multilingual templates in the corporate design, standard text modules and terms, sent by email.

How EVR runs sales on ROM

EVR uses ROM across the entire sales process. Customers, contacts, and opportunities sit in a rail-specific CRM. The sales pipeline grows out of it. The team calculates every lane with the calculation tool. Paths, traction, personnel, energy, and any further cost components are taken into account. For a subcontracted leg, an external partner’s all-in price is booked as external costs. The result flows straight into the offer. EVR creates an offer document in its own corporate design with the right terms and sends it by email, all from one interface. As a newly launched company, EVR also helps shape the product: its feedback feeds directly into Rail-Flow’s roadmap.

The results

For a company that didn’t exist a few months ago, EVR already runs a complete, rail-specific sales process. The first calculation became the first offer: around 180 offers were created in ROM in the first five months.

The business case is simple. A young operator grows by bringing more high-quality offers to more customers, faster. ROM removes the things that slow a new team down: rebuilding rail calculation logic by hand and pulling offers, pipeline, and customer data together across separate tools. EVR’s people spend their time calculating and winning traffic. Faster, consistent offers mean more tenders answered on time and more revenue.

And the platform grows with them. The same ROM that handles EVR’s first offers can also map sales across multiple entities and countries, with role-based permissions and per-entity templates. EVR can add entities, countries, brands, and request types without switching systems. Built for growth, from day one.