25% decrease in elevator maintenance costs

Challenge

The owner of a high rise luxury multifamily building in Brooklyn, New York is known for delivering a premium experience to tenants as well as outsized returns to investors. When it comes to managing their physical assets, the company counts on their highly experienced engineers and highly-regarded maintenance contractors.

Despite their best efforts, the elevators in a newly constructed 57-story multifamily highrise were experiencing chronic issues. For customer-centric landlords, elevator shutdowns and entrapments are disruptive events that are avoided at all costs.

Initially, the engineering team and their consultants rented monitoring equipment to help diagnose problems. However, the team realized that it was not sustainable to continue paying the high rental fees and that they needed a more permanent solution.

Solution

After multiple attempts to diagnose the root cause of the issues, building operators decided to tackle the problem with technology. The company implemented the Enertiv Platform because they recognized the need for a level of data granularity that only Enertiv could deliver.

The approach was two pronged. First, elevator performance data was collected to identify patterns that would inform a root cause diagnosis. Through this analysis, Enertiv’s client success team worked closely with on-site engineers to uncover a high voltage condition that was contributing to the elevator shutdowns.

Next, Enertiv’s platform was used to analyze the efficacy of maintenance and repair strategies on the elevators. The data collected by the Enertiv Platform was overlaid with maintenance tickets to understand the discrepancies in logged time and actual work performed, as well as the relationship between preventative maintenance and elevator failures.

Result

In the first month after the initial analysis was provided to the client, elevator entrapments fell 75% and the total amount of time reported by the maintenance vendor fell 25%, even while preventative maintenance time reported increased nearly 300%.

The significant increase in time spent on preventative maintenance was more than offset by the reduction in time spent on repairs, which are known to take longer and be more costly. Simply by adding transparency and accountability, the landlord was able to improve the tenant experience while lowering operating expenses related to maintenance labor.

The company is currently collaborating with Enertiv to develop an elevator-specific sensor package that can be rolled out across the portfolio.