The Elevator Consultants has offered up strategic best practices for owners with elevators in their buildings in response to several elevator and escalator-related incidents nationwide.
Following incidents such as Chicago’s Hancock Building elevator plunging 84 floors in November 2018, a Texas hospital employee seriously injured in an elevator accident and the housekeeper who was trapped for three days in a Manhattan elevator, The Elevator Consultants offers three key strategies to help building owners ensure elevator maintenance and safety.
Reevaluate Your Elevator Service Contract
You may be shocked to learn just how often buildings are being charged for services they are not receiving, premature modernizations, parts not available, unnecessary repairs, redundant service calls and break/fix maintenance.
The lesson learned here is that regular inspections are not enough to ensure your equipment is maintained to industry standards. Building owners and managers have to actually enforce their service contracts and ensure necessary maintenance is being done.
Include KPIs and Accountability Measures in Your Elevator Contract
Buildings implement a number of policies and SOPs to dictate their use—owners’ rules and regulations, insurance requirements, building safety regulations, etc. It is relatively easy to include elevator service provider requirements in these policies.
The building should also instate an elevator service contract that includes terms and conditions that align with the building and its operational needs. That contract should have key performance indicators and service level agreement terms that hold the elevator service provider accountable for errors and gaps in service.
Keep Detailed Records
Buildings can monitor service providers manually, but why when the advancements in technology have made it so much easier? Technologies like ElevatorApp, our elevator monitoring software, can automate the process of identifying and resolving issues with much more efficiency than manual methods. Moreover, the building owner then owns the data which has detailed information about all aspects of your equipment, including detailed onsite service and repair record and all history — even if you change service providers.
Many owners work with an elevator consultant to ensure correct interpretation of data, fast resolution of problems and protect your capital assets — elevators and escalators.