The holiday season is a perfect time for reflection, a moment to look back on these past months.

As this year draws to a close and the holiday season is upon us, we Railnovians have taken time to reflect on 2022. What a ride! We looked back on the successes achieved with our clients. We also highlighted Railnovians’ achievements in these past 12 months and fondly remembered the great moments we had together.

The holiday season is all about sharing

Because sharing is caring, we thought we would look back at our year with you! And as is now Railnova tradition, we are sticking to our principles and staying digital.

Grab some hot cocoa, take a look at the video below and make sure to turn on your sound for a full experience!

Railnovian highlights this holiday season, growing teams!

We have come a long way this year. Our team gained nine Railnovians from all over the world!

We started with a bang and welcomed Messaline Nicolas on January 3. She has extensive experience in production and is our pick-and-place queen! On the weekends, she travels through France and Belgium with her Dalmatian to cheer on her husband at Sidecar Motocross competitions.

Hervé Muanza joined Railnova shortly after as a cable maker for our Train Interface Team. He likes to care about the quality of the things he creates and is a big fan of being precise. Besides spending time with his baby and toddler, Hervé is passionate about cars. He avidly follows Formula 1 and can talk about his favourite team (Mercedes) for hours on end!

In January, we also welcomed Ashley Argüello Blaison to the marketing team. Ashley lives in Paris, but is originally from California. Her main area of expertise is digital communications and social media strategy. She is fluent in English, Spanish, German, and French. But also speaks Italian, Arabic, and is learning Portuguese and Hungarian. Yeah, she has a passion for languages, learning, and reading.

Valya Krusheva joined Railnova’s HR department in May. Her main expertise is the management of payroll, compensation and benefits. But she also enjoys a nice Bikram yoga session at the end of a long day managing payroll in five different countries!

Andrea van Beek-Nagy is the D’Artagnan to our Customer Success team! She became an official Railnovian in June but is a veteran of the railway industry. Andrea brings with her years of experience in technical administration, logistical planning as well as knowledge about maintenance, repairs, and documentation of rolling stock. To top it all off, she’s an excellent cook!

François Finfe joined Railnova this summer. He brings a lot of experience from the Embedded Linux world, and he has even worked on a train data logger in the past! In addition, François also has experience with Hardware Design. So you can see how natural it was for him to become a Railnovian! François is a musician, homebrewer, and amateur radio operator who enjoys cycling on the weekends!

Geoffrey Bultot is a veteran Railnovian, having done not one but two internships with us beforehand! He officially joined Railnova this fall as a hardware designer and embedded developer. Other than making excellent memes, Geoffrey likes the simple things in life. Spending time with his loved ones, working wood and having a drink while reading about the international financial markets!

Giomar Bautista Cervantes also interned at Railnova before becoming an official long-term Railnovian this fall as an electro-mechanical engineer. Giomar studied mechatronic engineering in Mexico and electromechanical engineering at ULB-VUB in Belgium. She’s an avid reader and loves to swim. Her love of cooking is only rivalled by her passion for eating, especially if margaritas are in the mix!

Valentine Le Pelletier joined Railnova in the Supply Chain team, where she has been working as Junior Supply Chain Manager for the past months. She’s also a veteran Railnovian who interned in Supply Chain a few years ago. She did her master’s thesis with Railnova on electronics production. Besides her love for everything Supply Chain, she is also a devoted sitcom watcher. If you have some spare time, she warmly recommends the French show Dix pour cent.

Assets, assets, assets

We currently manage almost 4 000 assets all over Europe, 3 955 to be exact. So we wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers and all of the platform users for their confidence in our solutions, for their continued trust in us and for their unwavering loyalty.

With so many assets handled, it is only normal that our wonderful Customer Success Managers have their hands full this year. They have addressed almost 2 000 support tickets! We take pride in answering every single request that comes through, via chat or email, with the same care and thoughtfulness. Having so many support tickets resolved shows this dedication. It also shows that our clients are very actively using the software!

Producing in the heart of Brussels

Brussels, the seat of the European Parliament and capital of beer, is also the birthplace of our Railsters. This year, over 500 devices were produced in Brussels’ trendy Saint-Gilles quarter! This is our second year producing the motherboard, and our Railsters, in-house. Being able to manufacture so many remote monitoring and edge computing devices in the heart of Brussels is no small feat! We were able to almost double our production this year compared to 2021.

Adventures and travels galore

We went to the sun! You read that correctly. Our client’s assets have taken our Railsters on a journey of more than 134 million kilometres altogether. That’s almost the distance from the earth to the sun. Our clients have been busy all over Europe and taking Railsters for the ride.

We have also processed 720 billion data points this year. That’s the equivalent of 20 billion Tweets!

Students welding components on a Railster motherboard

Railnovians at large

2022 also saw the return of in-person everything, and we loved this. The year was filled with events and field missions, big and small. We started with a Railnova-first: the Student Career Day.

At Railnova, students are valued members of our teams, as Maxim’s story is proof. You can read all about it here: Maxime, from Student to Master – Railnova. It only seemed logical to start our event calendar with an invitation for them to visit our offices and get a first-hand experience of the Railnova way. We were also present at external student fairs to do some outreach directly at universities. It was fun talking to students on campus. You can read more about it here: Student fair at Polytech Lille.

A fast and efficient team is a team that knows how to communicate well and leverage everyone’s strengths. We had our fair share of internal workshops in this sense. Take a look at one of the outcomes for our Professional Service’s team: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6917019027286425600. We are stronger together, our teams are more efficient and create faster results for happier clients!

Railnovians were also out and about doing various field missions. Our clients are never short of ideas to leverage our solutions. They know how to project themselves into the future. We were thrilled that 2022 brought back the “in-person” aspect of business, also for field missions. Fifteen field missions were successfully led by Railnovians this year.

Our engineers were back on the road, making our client’s wildest dreams come true. We want to take this opportunity to thank those who constantly trust us with their dreams and ambitions to make their operations smoother. We are truly grateful for this commitment and awed at how far we have come together!

While we started the year with students, we ended it with our clients and trusted partners in the spotlight. The Railnova Tech Day was a success on many levels. The biggest reward was seeing all our happy clients face-to-face. You can read all about it here: Railnova Tech Day. You can also take a peek at the day’s overview or follow the talks from our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Eh08mJHfXAk.