Business Background
Otis Elevator was founded in 1853 with core business to design, manufacture, installation and service of elevators, escalators and moving walkways. UTC (United Technologies) bought OTIS Elevator in mid 1970s and OTIS had always provided a steady profit contribution to UTC.
Case Issues
Throughout the time, the business focus of elevator industry has shifted from the “hardware” to the service provided. Not only because the service provided is one of the main factors of buyer’s decision, but also the service market has the characteristic of steady demand and high profitability. While the revenue and profits are from new sales in a new market as China, the service accounted about 75% of revenue in a mature market. In the early 1980s, Otis Elevator implemented OTISLINE customer service center and improved a lot the customer service with the help if IT application, notably REM elevator monitoring.
OTIS’ current E*logistic system assist OTIS’ staffs in the following functions:
- Project proposal: gathering account information, determining elevator configuration, proposal preparation and finally fed the information to financial systems.
- Sales processing: Order is then booked, validated and scheduled. The field-installation supervisor will work with the customer for any reengineering which is visible to the supply chain.
- Order fulfillment: CLCs (regional contract logistics center) and SSIs (subsystem integrators), the backbone system of supply chain, depend a lot on network technologies to estimate, specify and process product administration, contract engineering and layouts, customer service and contract control etc.
- Field Installation: The company address ...