Welcome to the Schindler Lift Lab, a Schindler blog about software, electronics, and the people working on these topics inside our company. The blog is curated and maintained by Schindler CTO Milan Hub; the first Schindler R&D office based in Italy!
You might know that Schindler has been designing and deploying elevators escalators since the 19th century, currently being one of the top manufacturers of elevators, escalators, and moving walks worldwide.
What you might not be aware of is how software is gaining a central role in modern elevators.
It is a process we have seen over the last few years in a lot of industries that are traditionally more mechanical-centered. The reason behind this is simple: the more we want a product to connect to the other tech elements in our lives, the more we want it to be able to take decisions to ease our interaction with it, the more we require flexibility and modularity, the more software it needs to run.
One example is the automotive industry.
In 2015, Elon Musk declared Tesla to be "a software company as much as it is a hardware company" [1], and subsequently the Model S was branded a "very sophisticated computer on wheels". Since then, the number of electronic components in cars, along with the complexity of their software, has exploded.
The cost of these electronic components in a car is also increasing [2], resulting in chip shortage impacting the auto industry [3]. Moreover, this trend impacts recruitment practices, as automakers are trying to attract the best talents [4] in order to build up the most competitive software teams.
Meanwhile, other difficulties inherently linked to manufacturing a complex product like an electronic car have started to emerge, proving the case in point that the domain knowledge and experience resulting from decades in the field have to go hand in hand with good software (and not be replaced by it) [5] [6].
All of this already applies and will continue to do so in different shades to the elevator market, too. New elevators need complex software to provide a modern user experience and, at the same time, satisfy strict safety requirements.
To keep up, we at Schindler have adopted modern software tools and strategies to rethink a product that have been around without radical changes for more than 100 years.
We are pushing innovations while setting up a digital ecosystem around elevators and escalators. Schindler Ahead, the digital brand of the group, has been developing solutions such as SmartMirror and MediaScreen for improving the user experience of customers. At the same time, we focus on enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of deployed infrastructure with platforms such as RemoteMonitoring.
To meet the goals of this software revolution, we need software talents, both at our HQ as well as at our R&D hub in Milan. If you want to join a great team working with cutting-edge technologies on complex products, please visit our career website.
Don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us at liftlab@schindler.com if you have any questions or want to provide valuable feedback about the blog.
This blog was written by Lorenzo Rizzello.