1. Consider the time when Otisline was being thought of.

To retain leadership position,

Otis was in desperate need to do something drastic. Do you agree or dont you?
Justify your position.
Given the situation OTIS was in, it was absolutely necessary to replace the older system, with
something that could effectively address all the problems that the company was facing at the
time. The system that existed before OTISLine was causing 3 major problems. Firstly, service
personnel were dispatched from local offices to address any servicing problems with its line
of products. This meant that Otis was losing out on revenue generating opportunities in such
cases by deploying its own spare-parts, technicians etc. Secondly, due to lack of a centralized
system, there was not much knowledge sharing between different offices and thus
coordinated efforts could not be orchestrated within a service area. And lastly, the older
system allowed for only critical issues concerning customer complaints to be escalated to the
higher management, by which point there was a termination of customer contract. Thus with
the high service times, negative image in minds of customers and losing business
opportunities to emerging competitors and auxiliary service providers, required OTIS to do
something drastic to address all of these issues at the earliest. OTISLine was conceived with
these things in mind. The system replaced the far less efficient phone-paper-pen based
system, and thereby allowed for a much faster and efficient handling of service requests.
Through leveraging IT capabilities, the system streamlined communications within the
company and significantly reduced the response time to servicing requests. There was proper
forwarding and escalation of these requests to appropriate levels of management to
In order to installing the OTISLINE a huge amount of data and time must have been required.
The transformation must have been a challenge both for the employees as well as for the
managers, whose task area now had been increased. While looking at the organization chart
you see how complicated the way of communication was/is in the organization. The gain
from the new system must have caused a tremendous impact when it comes to the
communication speed between the lower organization layers to the top management. An
increasing of the company knowledge sharing and an improvement of the product reliability
will therefore cause a higher customer satisfaction.
Additional to the OTISLINE another important IT application was implemented called REM
elevator monitoring. This system enables the company to monitor an elevator control system
and thereby detect problems before customers were even aware of them. Together with the
OTISLINE these two systems provide significant data, to improve customer service.