Charged up

摘要

We're all witnesses to a global structural change which affects all areas of our industrialized world. The sort of clear delineations that were known in the Wilhelminian era are dissolving or no longer exist. The boundaries between production and service have become fuzzy. Whole business processes are now outsourced to external service providers. Outsourcing has long ceased to be a dirty word and has become an everyday practice. Nearly all companies pave the way for a global exchange with customers and suppliers. This process of permanent change does not call for history books to be rewritten, but the definition of services in some thesauruses no longer appears up to date. In its 2003 edition, for example, the Bertelsmann youth thesaurus defines services as: "An economic activity that does not produce goods. The service sector includes, for example, banks, insurance firms and restaurants." Today's industrial world is far more complex and can no longer be compartmentalized so neatly. The former parts producer has become a system supplier and competent development partner, and service-oriented companies today offer all-round packages tailored to meet the customer's individual needs. The companies that make up the ThyssenKrupp Services segment are creative proof of this new self-conception because they optimize their processes virtually on an ongoing basis and generate new business areas and customers by means of innovative developments.