Role of IoT in the Digital World
Marcus Galafassi, VP, IT & CIO, Otis and Tony Black, President, Otis Service
Today as a part of United Technologies, we are bolstering our legacy with the latest in technology to introduce a completely new digital service ecosystem. This innovative system connects our teams and customers to each other, providing the information they want and expect in today’s digital age.
Connecting
Moving people is at the center of future thinking. But we must embrace the next generation of digital tools to sustain and advance our industry leadership.
How do we get there? We learned, tested and then we iterated by listening to customers and our own employees. We talked to customers, creating journey maps, and pain point analyses. We also talked to those closest to our customers—our 31,000 service technicians—in focus groups and ride-along sessions to grasp the full extent of the challenges they were encountering in keeping some 2 billion people on the move every day.
Then we stepped up with one of the largest investments Otis has ever made in digital and engineering.
A key component of that investment is IoT.
Say, an elevator door remains open too long. That elevator’s control unit will alert us, and then we’ll feed that alert into a cloud-based data warehouse.
Simplifying
Developing more holistic customer relationships is one of the major benefits we expect with IoT. Our ultimate goal is to provide our service teams with instant access to the contract and installation history, and the service performance data associated with every account. To better support our customers, we plan to share with them the system’s analysis of the performance we deliver to them.
Tony Black, President, Otis Service
We’re also relying on IoT to help us address challenges our mechanics have grappled with for years. Say a mechanic needs a part, but can’t identify it. In the past, that employee would call the branch for that identification. Or, they’d drive there, and hunt for the part in a giant paper directory.
Today our mechanics find that part far more quickly thanks to a Parts App we’ve developed and installed on the iPhones we’ve provided them with. What’s more, they can use that app to access an image of the part and the instructions for installing it.
Even better, the Parts App is just one of a series of smart phone tools we’ve developed for our technicians, and the mechanics reinvest the time these apps save them into getting to know their customers by name and offering them more customized service than was previously not possible.
The IoT Imperative
As in history’s great innovation epochs—be it the steam engine, electricity, or automation—today’s technology is revolutionizing the way we work, live, and move through the world. Driverless cars, AI, and IoT affirm that the overlap between digital and physical is more intertwined than ever before.
The imperative is clear: whether you’re a 165-year-old elevator company or a startup, we must all evolve to take advantage of digital innovation. And we must all do it to keep people moving safely to their future destinations.
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