What happens when you combine two great things? Something even greater.
That’s the whole idea behind our sustainable maintenance contracts, which we’ve just introduced in Germany. By combining remote monitoring with a fleet of electric maintenance vehicles, we're now offering contracts with the lowest carbon footprint possible to our customers.
The benefits of this approach are tangible – and impressive. Our green maintenance contracts lead to a 99.5 percent reduction in carbon emissions compared to a traditional maintenance approach.
It’s not a wild claim. TÜV Rheinland, one of the leading and most trusted certification agencies in the world, has certified that number.
A 99.5 percent reduction in carbon emissions is anything but anecdotal. So how do we achieve such a feat? By reducing the need for our technicians to travel in the first place – thanks to access to real-time data of our units – and by having them use electric vehicles when they do need to hit the road.
Using the Internet of Escalators and Elevators (IoEE), our connected units generate a constant stream of data, which our technicians can always access, providing them with a detailed understanding of what is going on with our units – escalators, elevators and moving walkways – at any given time.
For that reason, connected units reduce the need for our technicians to travel, by providing our technicians with all the information they need before they even reach our customers’ units.
That means every single trip we take is optimized: our technicians know beforehand what issues to look out for, which spare parts and tools to bring along. In the end, this translates into fewer trips for our technicians. Issues are solved faster, too. Our findings, which have been endorsed by TÜV Rheinland, show that a shift to remote maintenance alone generates an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions.
Connected units can sometimes be maintained or troubleshooted remotely – removing the need for our technicians to travel altogether. In cases where our technicians still need to travel on-site to attend to our units – they use electric vehicles, allowing them to reduce their carbon emissions even further.
Everyone wins
This new service offering will also bring us closer to our objective of becoming carbon neutral by 2040. Considering that 60 percent of our direct emissions are attributable to our fleet, making each field trip count is paramount.
Reducing our carbon emissions at source lies at the center of this approach. "It was particularly important to us that we focus on the actual reduction of CO2 emissions, and not just on offsetting," says Stefan Janssen, Business Manager Existing Installations at Schindler Germany.
We’re now piloting this initiative in other countries – Spain, France and Switzerland – and are looking to make this offering available even further afield in the coming months.
We expect our offering will prove popular with building owners keen to make their properties more sustainable. With buildings accountable for 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and governments increasingly taxing buildings based on their sustainability profile, anything we can do to help them cut their carbon emissions and future-proof their building is welcome.
As the importance of sustainability continues to grow, it’s only a matter of time before we can expect customers to require green maintenance as a standard. That’s why we’ve already started to build this into the way we work, so that we have a platform ready to meet their future needs – today.