CIO Straight Talk - Issue 7 - 12

12

The Change Factor
An initiative on the scale of our digital transformation
program represents a huge change for an organization.
Managing it requires an appreciation of three factors
affecting this kind of change.
The first, which often comes into play with digital
projects, is the traditionally strong functional focus
of most organizations. An initiative like ours will span
organizational boundaries and integrate the activities of
numerous functions - a business line's service function,
R&D, IT, and Supply Chain, for example - and requires
their support. To encourage this, we empowered
cross-functional teams and actively promoted what we
dubbed Schindler's "unity of effort."
The second factor is the willingness and ability of
the workforce to change what they do. In our case, we
needed some 20,000 service technicians to suddenly
become digitally savvy. Most hadn't previously owned
a smart phone, and we expected moving them from
pencil and paper to a digital platform would be a
tremendous challenge. But they surprised us. With
training, 60-year-old technicians were excitedly
showing off the digital toolkit we created for the iPhone
to their children and grandchildren.
The third factor influencing change management
is the IT function itself. The traditional IT organization
focuses on standardization and developing perfect
solutions, which can take months or even years. But
for the digital platform initiative, IT needed a new
mindset - agile, risk taking, focusing on speed as much
as perfection. So we formed a separate legal entity,
Schindler Digital Business, which is an incubator for
speedy innovation.
The digital tool kit for our service technicians
exemplifies the Digital Business startup's speedy
and agile approach. The first release came just six
months after work began and, although it didn't
have 100 percent perfect functionality, it offered a
tremendous user experience. The last, say, 20 percent
of functionality was added in the second and
third releases.

significantly improved elevator uptime.
But digitizing our products has involved more than
simply connecting them over the Internet of Things
and reading the data they generate. It involves actively
analyzing the data and making use of that analysis.
So, for example, the predictive maintenance data
isn't used simply to anticipate problems. We use it
to calculate the spare parts that service technicians
covering a specific region will need to have with them in
their cars on a given day, as they travel from site to site.
Smarter Employees Smarter products don't only
improve customer service and satisfaction but also the
day-to-day experience of the technicians providing
that service.
Schindler's 20,000 service technicians are part
of the ecosystem of people who receive initial alerts
transmitted directly from elevators when there is a
service issue. No longer does the facilities manager
have to call the Schindler call center, which then calls
the technician and tells him to report to a certain
location. The technician may already be on the way to
a building when a facilities manager becomes aware of
the problem - information that appears on the facility
manager's Schindler Dashboard mobile app.
Furthermore, as we have seen, a service technician
responding to a call often will have the right
replacement parts in his vehicle - something we've
gotten much better at predicting in the past two years,
as the algorithms have improved based on experience.
Think how crucial this is to the time-critical task of
bringing an elevator back into service. In the old
days, a technician would evaluate a disabled elevator,
determine the part that he needed, and head back to
his office to get it. In cities, he likely would have faced
lengthy traffic jams as he was on his way to retrieve the
part, while the out-of-service elevator remained idle.
Of course, with our new digital capabilities, the
technician may not need a spare part at all. Predictive
maintenance will have meant that a technician has
replaced the part on a previous, regularly scheduled
maintenance visit already.
Whatever the scenario, the service technician is now
equipped with a mobile toolkit when he arrives on
the scene. It is very small and quite light - because it

Citibank installs ATMs in all its New York branches.
When a huge blizzard hits New York in January
1978, banks are closed for days and ATM use
increases by 20%.

1979

1977

is contained in his iPhone! This digital toolkit contains

Federal Express launches COSMOS (Customers,
Operations, and Services Master Online System),
digitizing the management of people, packages,
vehicles, and weather scenarios in real time.
CIO Straight Talk - Issue 7

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CIO Straight Talk - Issue 7
