Dear friends and colleagues,

During the recent Munich City Forum economists and management consultant agreed that Germany will experience its worst economic crises since the post war era. Hans-Werner Sinn (Ifo President) declares: „It is dramatic. I have never seen times like these.” With this statement he is referring to the economic situation and unemployment rates in the USA and believes that Germany within the next year and a half will follow.

This is the reason we see German businesses act so harshly. The head of finance of Siemens Joe Kaeser announced on Friday the immediate siege of the expansion of part-time labor in many Siemens factories. His reasoning for this action being that the rate of decline has drastically increased and is most noticeable in the industrial sector.

It would be foolish to blow off the prediction of experts. The worst is yet to come for Germany and we need to adapt to the new condition with lightning speed. Who does not accomplish this will be out of the game. “To be or not to be: That is the question”.

How can enterprises deal with an economic crises that they have never been seen before? The biggest difficulty lies in the fact that most of the enterprise managers has never been tested on this kind of crisis in their lifetime. There are too few experiences and far less successful recipes for managing such a crises.

We here at XAVO see this economic down turn as a chance to produce and market our products better and more powerful. Therefore we will rely on our biggest strengths which are in the fields of “Operational Excellence” and “Empowerment of People”.

1. Operational Excellence

We are predominately involved with our Industrial Clients in the fields of product development, production scheduling and production management. Our clients are constantly faced with the ever growing challenge of developing innovative products and getting these products to the consumer market as speedy as possible and at the same time reducing cost at a enormously growing rate. We are able to support our clients in this task and enable them to achieve greater of what their current system installed. With this we strive to work with our clients toward innovative, “End-to-End Excellence” strategies, which enables our clients employees to continues improvement processes. The excellence strategies are also aimed to advance new directions of business definitions and to be able to recognize and facilitate those. For our clients it is important to know that Xavo’s Excellence Mottos are long term designs proven, tried and tested on well known platform suppliers like SAP and Siemens.

2. Empowerment of People

Enterprises are successful when first of all every employee brings his or her full talent to the business, when secondly every employee brings his or her expertise in their job description to the table and thirdly when all employees work together as a team to produce well and deliver excellence. The Empowerment of every employee is therefore the largest social task. Equally important for the employee is knowing that he and his family are secure, a security of future prosperity against the ever growing threat of unemployment and layoffs. Nothing is more important for an individual then knowing and experiencing. The power of coworkers are a tested principal within the Xavo Organization. When solutions are found and problems solved by Xavo for our clients we too have the strongest employees in the forefront, not to forget that empowerment for most is not always sweet. It is often associated with a lot of hard work, sweat and constant learning.

Everything is going to be alright.

Best Regards

Detlef Riedel

Xavo/CEO