Editorial

Dear readers

Consistency is also a form of sustainability - The world is in a disruptive phase, across all three pillars of sustainability. Our ecosystem is more threatened than ever, classic macroeconomic models are being questioned or even thrown overboard, and our social values are increasingly being turned upside down.

How can you ensure resilience in this disruptive environment? As a consulting and software company that offers services and products for the railway system in an increasingly rapidly changing environment, our job is to find solutions to these challenges. We do not understand stability in the sense of immutability, but rather as change through patience, persistence and continuity.

The railway system and, by definition, the system actors are subject to long-term investment and institutional cycles, which also requires continuity for all market participants. That's why we favor long-term thinking over short-term thinking, proactivity over reactivity, and investment over opportunism in our collaboration models, methods and products.

SMA began digitizing processes for planning the railway system very early on. Digitalization is not an end in itself, but always a means to an end: the complexity of system planning should be reduced through intelligent modeling. This basic principle has always shaped our mental model and our long-term strategy.

Complexity management is also central to our software development activities. Constant and sustainable investments in our software are only possible if the complexity of software development remains manageable in the long term. We want to report on this in our introductory article this year.

In addition, we are once again pleased to present to you the various activities and projects in our two areas of consulting and software that have accompanied us over the past year.

We hope you enjoy reading our current Annual report.

Eric Cosandey Thomas Bickel

CEO, Head of Consulting, Head of Software