Sometimes a single word is enough to throw a calculation into chaos. Or better said: sometimes it’s enough to initially overlook such a word.

Guillaume Tréfeu from the pump manufacturer KSB can still remember such a story clearly. It was about a feedwater pump unit with a turbine drive for a power plant. Pump units are part of the company’s specialty with annual sales of around three billion euros. The customer, a power plant builder, was also someone with whom KSB had already worked. So this should be possible somehow, even if it requires a custom-made product. After all, you can’t produce something like this off the shelf. And so the sales engineer from the quotation department for conventional power plants sat down at his desk and went through the technical specifications: 30 files, around 1,200 pages. Tréfeu ticked every box and made the power plant builder an offer.