Go with the flow: Modernizing without interrupting
“Breaking the flow”: a no-no for writers, musicians, artists – and elevator technicians alike.
Interrupting has always been considered rude – good manners dictate that we disrupt someone only if it’s strictly necessary. In cities where millions depend on vertical transportation every day, this principle goes beyond courtesy and raises an important question: how do we modernize the elevators and escalators that keep cities moving without disturbing their flow?
That’s where minimal disruption comes in.
Modernization is inevitable – every elevator, escalator, and moving walk eventually reaches the point where it needs upgrading. The real challenge isn’t whether to modernize, but how to do it while keeping people, businesses, and cities moving. In high-traffic environments – think airports, subway stations, offices, and hotels, downtime isn't just inconvenient – it’s critical.
Minimizing disruption during modernization is central to our service mindset. Reducing inconvenience to the minimum might seem like a no-brainer for a service-minded company like ours – but doing it consistently takes planning, innovation, and dedication.
Whenever we modernize equipment, our teams go to great lengths to reduce the impact of their work on our customers’ day-to-day building operations. Whether it’s through planning projects down to the tiniest detail, working nights and weekends, ensuring our colleagues are trained to carry out the work as efficiently as possible, or using our technology and innovation to minimize the amount of heavy work (and the noise that comes with it), our teams pull all the stops to make this process as seamless as possible.
Here are just a few of the recent projects where our minimal disruption approach made a difference:
Our minimal disruption approach
- Planning every detail to minimize interruptions
- Working nights and weekends when necessary
- Training teams to execute work efficiently and safely
- Using technology to keep the elevator group running to standard during upgrades
- Harnessing innovation to return equipment to service faster.
Island Shangri-La, Hong Kong
No one likes noisy work - and especially not when your building plays host to a five-star hotel that prides itself on offering reprieve from the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong. Teams committed to keeping disruption to an absolute minimum and limiting noisy work to just one hour per day, instead coordinating across multiple teams and working night shifts to maintain the luxury experience the Island Shangri-La guests expect.
Scotia Plaza, Toronto
This mixed-use building sitting in the heart of downtown Toronto and connected to the city’s subway system sees an impressive amount of foot traffic every day. With tenants of this grade A office building expecting premium working conditions, the elevators at Scotia Plaza had to continue running without interruption and at peak performance throughout the modernization. Minimizing inconvenience to the tenants became the team’s mantra. Meticulous planning, fine-tuned day by day, made it possible. "It was an exercise in being invisible," says John Egan, who led the project.
680 George Street, Sydney
At 680 George Street in busy downtown Sydney, our colleagues modernized 26 elevators – all while keeping the building fully operational. Using Schindler PORT Overlay technology, they optimized the performance of the elevators that remained in service while upgrading others offline – all on equipment originally installed by a competitor, proving that smart modernization can enhance any system while maintaining seamless service.
UOB Plaza, Singapore
Our colleagues carried out a full modernization using state-of-the-art technologies designed to maximize efficiency. To avoid disrupting daily operations, the project team not only modernized the building’s 33 elevators in stages, using Schindler PORT Overlay to optimize traffic flow – they also used our Schindler INTRUSS® technology to modernize escalators, returning them to service much faster than if a complete overhaul had been needed.
MARTA, Atlanta
When Covid-19 lockdowns temporarily closed Atlanta’s metro stations, our teams seized the opportunity to accelerate work on the network’s dozens of escalators and elevators. Using Schindler INTRUSS® technology, they upgraded escalators without replacing their structural trusses. All modernized escalators and elevators now feature 24/7 remote monitoring, minimizing downtime – and disruption – for the 115 million passengers moving through the network each year.
When modernization runs this smoothly, people can go about their routines uninterrupted and unaffected – experiencing only the improvements, never the disruption. And the city’s rhythm flows on.