Group - 8 Otisline

Assignment -4
Group -8
Amit Agarwal – 06 I Priyanka Jain -38
Amrit Mohanty- 09 I Swardesh Jha-52
Vinay thakur-56 I Vishwa Ranjan-58
OTISLine (A)
Q1. Otis has been the market leader in both sales and service segments. Consider the time when
OTISLINE was just being conceived. Why do they need to do anything at all and that too in the
service sector?
OTIS was a market leader in both the aspects of elevator industry i.e. sales and services. However,
the services industry despite being very stable had become very competitive due to entrance of many
small players since services involved higher margin on profits, which attracted many entrants in the
field. OTIS was able to charge premium for its products because of its established name but it had to
maintain the quality and customer satisfaction high to get new installation contracts (more sales) and
service contracts. It all started for OTIS with a companywide cost reduction program in 1981. Porter
analysis has been done as follows to find the key reasons for the program:
 Remain the Market Leader: In order to remain at the market leader position, OTIS had to ensure a better
product quality & faster service than its competitors. This required an efficient Service Management
system especially to handle previous fault related data.
 Centralized System: High variance in quality of answering services deployed by OTIS was a big
motivator to come up with a centralized system like OTISLINE, which actually has the sole interest of
reducing the customer response time. A centralized system would enable the company to accept calls
even during non-prime time. This didn’t work efficiently for the company through local answering
services due to non-alignment of interests.
 Better Customer service: response on call-backs till now varied across locations and it was felt to make it
more effective to enhance customer satisfaction, the company needed to be more effective across all
locations. Get timely feedbacks from the customers on service quality.
 Cost reduction: Of the 2300 service mechanics employed by NAO in 1985, most handled both
call- backs and preventive maintenance. According to NAO, OTIS could save up to $5 million by
reducing call-backs which centralized system could possibly achieve.
 Available Budget: As the cost reduction program completed in 1982, OTIS Management had a budget
to assess the contribution of IT systems in quality improvement of maintenance service.
Q2. Which aspects of the OTIS organization would be affected by OTISLINE, if implemented?
Following aspects of OTIS would be affected if implemented:
Information services – OTISLINE dispatcher was a given a local display and short database path
so that he could provide critical information to the customer in very short time frame. Because of
importance of OTISLINE, a huge portion of information services budget was earmarked for it
support.
Customer Services – OTISLINE promoted the dispatcher efficiency by only assigning one
function to each dispatcher. It was expected that centre would soon receive 10,000 calls/day as
system gets implemented for all districts.
Dispatching and Control of Service Mechanics – OTISLINE helped in improving the timeliness
and quality of information available to district, region and NAO management significantly. Some
field office managers were critical about their control over the dispatching of service mechanics but
OTISLINE is being worked upon to address this issue.
Marketing –
 Equipment Sales team could access the NES application by calling OTISLINE which would allow them
to automate the production of status report on elevator sales prospects.
 OTISLINE improved NAO’s responsiveness to customer maintenance request.
 It improved communication between customer and service and sales department.
 There was a reduction in complaints and service calls due to OTISLINE.
 NAO was the first one to have professionally staffed customer service centre which was possible due to
OTISLINE.
Engineering –
 Remote Elevator Monitoring would monitor control system and log performance statistics onto a distant
computer. In case of problem, elevator could transmit message to computer which would then transmit
message to OTISLINE and dispatch a service mechanic.
 Hand Held terminals for service mechanics for communicating with OTISLINE dispatcher eliminating
the need for call in for service messages.
 OTISLINE could be used for telemarketing purposes to contact the new customer as well as notify old
customers.
 New equipment Sales could be expanded to new equipment ordering and also in car phone system
could also be installed to inform OTISLINE dispatcher in case of emergency situations like someone is
stuck in the lift.
 Q3. What would be the risks associated with OTISLINE? How did they try to take care of those?
1. As of now the biggest risk is to monitoring health of elevators on the basis of feedback given
or updated by dispatchers. Dispatchers were given 4 to 6 weeks of in-house training so the
knowledge transfer is depended on the skills of the dispatcher.
To overcome this short coming in future using REM (Remote Elevator Monitoring) by which
a microprocessor based elevator could monitor the control system and log performance
statistics directly onto a distant computer.
2. Overhead on Dispatcher to update the pocket notebook in which they recorded information on
each service call. Plan is to replace service mechanic pagers with Hand Held Pagers which
will eliminate the need for service mechanics to call in for messages and also same device
could be used to complete call back reports and to order parts for out of service elevators
3. Some Field managers raised concern about managing control over the dispatching of service
mechanics for callbacks that is also addressed by installing personal computers in local
offices to enable tracking of callback activity in their territories.

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Assignment -4

Vinay thakur-56 I Vishwa Ranjan-58

Following aspects of OTIS would be affected if implemented:

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