Within the Elevator Industry What Is the Role Played by It in the Services and Product Space? Is It the Same? Why and Why Not?

Case Question a: Within the elevator industry what is the role played by IT in the services and product space? Is it the same? Why and why not?

The global market for elevator industry has grown significantly over the years. There has been rise in popularity of smart intelligent elevators equipped with smart access controls. The industry has seen tough competition from Otis, Westinghouse, Dover, Montgomery, Schindler, US Elevators, and Fujitec. However during the period of 1970s and 1980s, Otis was the leader in the services and product space. The new equipment product sales was $1 billion market and services was $2 billion market.

The service market is much more stable than the product market as their sales was less correlated to IT as compared to the service market. Because of the steady demand and high profitability in the service space, elevator manufacturers often accepted a low margin on sale of an elevator in order to obtain the service contract, which accounted for almost 60% - 80% of the service contracts. And IT played a major role for this higher portion of profit. The major aspect was to improve the responsiveness and the quality of the service.

Service Space: As seen in the case, IT was used to establish centralized customer service department to accept customer requests for the elevator maintenance and to provide service dispatch both in prime time and non-prime time call-backs. And IT played a major role in reducing the call-back response time to almost less than a second as compared to the commercial local answering service where the lag was very high. This helped in increasing the visibility in the service of business of OTISLINE. Reporting and analytics helped OTISLINE to further improve the service by analysing the quality of the service rendered to the customers, right amount of escalations to the right authority based on the frequency of the call-backs. IT helped in automation of updating the customer master file in backend databases which not only improved the accuracy of the customer information stored but also helped in improving the efficiency of service retrieving the contract information, building location, service log regarding past servicing and so on and so forth. Statistical report generated with the help of IT in place helped to measure the wait period of next available dispatcher which further helped the management in efficient resource management. Ba