The elevator maintenance profession requires more skills than ever before. It’s a profession that has been evolving from mechanical to electronic and now digital skill sets.
There are some 570,000 elevators in France, and the fleet is aging; more than half are over 25 years old, and a quarter are over 40. Between eleven and twelve thousand new elevators are installed each year in French facilities. Some 30 million people take 100 million elevator trips per day, making elevators the most used “mode of transportation” in France!
It’s easy to see how vital modernization, maintenance, and repair are to the elevator market.
To meet this demand, new products and services are constantly being developed—most notably, smart devices. Elevator maintenance specialists need to be flexible and self-directed. They require a strong foundation in training, safety, and innovation, and they use their skills to improve mobility and accessibility for all.
The elevator market in France was once highly concentrated; it was dominated by the French subsidiaries of the top four global groups, while many small and intermediate-sized enterprises operated at a local level.
However, following the passage of the French Law for Real Estate Investment (Robien Package) of July 2, 2003 and Decree No. 2004-964 of September 2004, joint property owners were obligated to upgrade their elevators to meet new standards. When condo owners voted on those projects at their general meetings, elevator specialists were put in direct competition with smaller companies, which changed the market landscape.
Competition has grown even fiercer since that wave of renovations, favoring smaller companies that set themselves apart with lower pricing or superior quality of service, which is made possible by an expert CMMS. In addition to handling the many regulatory and operational constraints involved in their profession, the CMMS helps them:
- Optimize maintenance scheduling with dynamic calendars that increase technicians’ productivity and better distribute the workload among teams.
- Install connected tools in the facilities in order to share relevant data with the service provider and building manager, ensuring compliance with safety standards.
- Increase revenue by empowering technicians to draw up estimates remotely for small tasks (such as changing a floor button)
- Improve clients’ understanding by using the expert CMMS portals to share information with them
Expert CMMS for Elevator Specialists: Optimizing Field Operations
An expert CMMS for elevator specialists is a must these days for good management of administrative and operational teams’ tasks:
Technicians have direct access to all the information they need to complete their service call properly. With just a few clicks on their smartphone or tablet, they access a list of steps to follow during a maintenance visit. All they need to do is check off the items on the list as the visit progresses— even if they’re in offline mode.
This information is provided in real time to the manager and the client via the platform, on which the administrative team also has an elevator management dashboard—a centralized view of all data pertaining to the facilities.
From this type of platform, it is possible to:
- Access a log of completed services
- Manage the spare parts needed for each service call
- Schedule preventive and corrective service calls
- Improve corrective maintenance
- Send information to clients and control/audit firms for greater transparency
- Produce activity reports
This optimizes facility tracking. It becomes easier to delineate the maintenance plan, which has numerous benefits:
First, the number of breakdowns is reduced significantly, which ensures their long-term availability and safety, improving end users’ comfort.
Next, an optimized maintenance plan lowers maintenance costs by establishing a better balance between preventive and corrective service calls.
Finally, the expert CMMS prompts an increase in client feedback, which improves understanding of the client’s concerns.
This makes it possible to improve service quality (and, in turn, client satisfaction) while being assured of compliance with regulations and new standards.
Expert CMMS for Elevator Specialists: 100% safety – guaranteed compliance with standards
An expert CMMS helps elevator specialists adjust more easily to tougher regulations and safety standards in elevator testing and maintenance, such as requirements to follow a precise maintenance plan, specify the frequency of maintenance tasks, meet the specified time frames for completion of tasks, etc.
- Preventive visit obligation: By law, the interval between visits must be no greater than six weeks.Two semiannual visits and one annual visit, which include more in-depth testing elements, are also required.
- Emergency service call deadlines: In the event of a major elevator malfunction, including a stalled elevator, the company responsible for its maintenance must take action within a specified time frame, generally four hours.
- Moreover, elevator specialists are required to be available for service calls seven days per week for breakdowns and 24 hours a day to free a person trapped inside an elevator.
It’s easy to see how impossible it would be to achieve that level of organization without an expert CMMS designed for elevator specialists. Only this type of solution is capable of maintenance plan configurations that are sophisticated and optimized enough to meet these contractual obligations and get out of the rut of constant troubleshooting. That’s one less thing for elevator specialists to worry about!
Expert CMMS for Elevator Specialists: Connected Elevators + CMMS = A Winning Combo?
Innovations in elevator technology have a great deal to offer to an aging infrastructure.
That includes IoT (“Internet of Things”) solutions, the next generation of connected devices for sectors including real estate that have multiple functions. For example, you can check the status of a facility or piece of equipment remotely, with no travel required.
These connected devices therefore hold enormous potential for owner/managers in terms of cost reduction, disaster prevention, and maintenance efficiency. An estimated 150 billion of them will likely be in circulation worldwide by 2025. They represent guaranteed safety and an opportunity to offer round-the-clock availability of new, often automated, services without additional labor expenses.
It’s clear, then, that there are many benefits to installing next-generation IoT sensors on equipment, but the transferred data still must be processed and analyzed competently. That’s what an expert CMMS makes possible.
It incorporates the data provided by IoT sensors, analyzes the data in real time, and compares the data to a nominal model of the device’s operation in its environment to generate predictive operating models. In the event of a deviation in operations, alerts appear on the platform, allowing the technician to initiate service without alerting the client. That improves user perception and the end client’s satisfaction.
Indeed, by collecting and analyzing data to anticipate breakdowns, elevator connectivity reduces and minimizes incidents. When the sensor installed on an elevator identifies a recurring error, the maintenance team is notified of the need for service. With preventive maintenance thus optimized, breakdowns are avoided and user safety is improved.
Bringing elevators online for remote maintenance could reduce shutdowns by 90% and cut maintenance costs in half. Over time, it could even eliminate corrective maintenance by predicting breakdowns before they happen!