Agencies and Franchises

Requirements

RIMSCO/CATERMAN is looking for Agents and Franchisees to identify, recruit and support fast-food organisations, schools, colleges and similar caterers.
Agents/Franchisees must be IT competent and familiar with the fast-food industry.
RIMSCO is a software developer and ASP with no interest in providing/installing/maintaining/supporting hardware or PC software or Network/Broadband/Internet communications, nor in training or advising users.
All of our systems are entirely web based provided as a service over the internet. Consequently, we either contract out these functions or engage with suitable partners to meet customer requirements.

The Opportunity

According to the BBC news on Monday, 5th. November, 2007, there is now an average of ONE BILLION TEXT MESSAGES SENT PER WEEK in the UK alone.
The majority of the younger people have mobile phones and access to the internet.
These facts have not been lost on the major forward thinking fast-food businesses, who have realised that a large proportion of their customers use these methods of communication constantly, and in the future nearly all of their customers will do so - and unless their fast-food business engages with them they will be out of business!
Consequently, SMS text ordering and internet ordering have been made available to customers of the larger fast-food groups.
In order to compete, the smaller fast-food businesses must look to providing similar, or superior, facilities.
CATERMAN provides these facilities, with more in the pipeline.
However, many of these businesses/organisations either have no IT resource or have no personnel to spare.
Which is where you come in.

What's Involved?

Although CATERMAN is a huge comprehensive system capable of supporting large sophisticated users, in its simplest form for a small fast-food outlet, for example GREENFROG CHINESE RESTAURANT, the following is required:-
1. Set up.
A web site is created. This can be a basic web page on our servers addressed as www/caterman.org/your-clients-business-name, e.g. www.caterman.org/greenfrog.html (provided as part of our set up, try it now for a typical customer experience) or it can be their own website on any server. Essentially, all it contains is eye candy and pointers to our services with hidden parameters. On our servers, the business is created with data about the business, plus, of course, the menus and when they are available.
2. Installation.
The simplest installation at the fast-food end is a basic PC running a mail function, for example Outlook Express, which is set to seek new mail at one-minute intervals. The internet connection should preferably be broadband, but dial-up will suffice. The PC should be able to run a browser so that CATERMAN can be accessed, but this is not absolutely necessary if no personnel are available to use it.
3. Operation.
Assuming the appropriate menu cards (complete with or accompanied by an introduction to the new service and how to use it) have been distributed, and perhaps some advertising pointing to the website, customers wishing to use the system must first set up an account. They do this by visiting the website and entering their name, address, and mobile telephone number. Account set up is confirmed by text and email. A PIN code is transmitted to the phone to allow one-off access to the account whenever an internet order is to be placed by internet. If the fast-food business has a PayPal account (it has to be their PayPal account, not ours or yours) the customer can pre-pay for orders or deposit money on the account. When an order is placed, either by internet or text, it is confirmed by email (and by text to the phone if a text order), and an email is also sent to the fast-food outlet detailing the name and contact number of the customer, the selections made, and the prices, plus the time the order is to be collected. If the customer postcode/zip is on the list of postcodes/zips which the fast-food outlet delivers to, the customer may request delivery, and any time to deliver and any associated cost is detailed in the order confirmation. The customer may select a date and/or time for collection/delivery (otherwise, ASAP is assumed), and all orders are only accepted for the outlet's opening hours. Advance order load smoothing is provided to cater for busiest times. The scenarios catered for range from advance ordering (as far ahead as stipulated by the outlet) to the customer arriving at the resaurant and ordering from a table using his/her own phone or notebook/laptop/PDA or a screen provided by the restaurant.
4. Support.
From time to time, menus will change, prices will change, problems will occur, accounts will need correction or deletion, equipment will fail. You must provide for these situations if the user does not, either by contract or under your service agreement with the user.

5. Sales and Marketing.
This is up to you. A typical flyer can be found at Typical Flyer

Prices and Costs

CATERMAN costs £1/€1/$1 per day per concurrent power user. A power user is anyone with a password security level above zero. Fast-food customers of your users have a security level of zero, and are not counted as chargeable users.
In addition, every time CATERMAN sends an SMS text, there is a charge of £0.05/€0.07/$0.10
CATERMAN sends an SMS text everytime a text order is received from a phone and everytime a customer logs on over the internet (the dynamic PIN code is provided by SMS text to the customer's mobile phone).
These are our charges, we make no resriction on your charges to users where CATERMAN is provided to them under your brand name.

Terms and Conditions for Agents/Franchisees

Options

Essentially there are two alternatives for you to consider.
First, there is nothing to stop you setting up an operation which provides CATERMAN as is to your clients, where you profit by providing all of the ancilliary aspects such as hardware, implementation, maintenance and support. This costs you nothing up front, from our point of view you are just another customer, although in fact you are a middle man and your client pays you and you pay us.
Second, you may wish to create your own brand of CATERMAN, with your own websites, etc. This option requires investment on your part (and ours) in creating the CATERMAN version (functionally, it is identical to standard CATERMAN but has different graphics/legends/etc.)

First Steps
Contact us at sales@caterman.org with Subject: Agency, detailing who you are and what you would like from us. We will then provide further details including commission rates and set up costs.