Wipro Helps Otis to become the

‘Internet Elevator Company’

Company Background

Otis is the world's largest manufacturer of elevators, escalators, people movers and horizontal transportation systems. 

Otis’ after-sales service business is a major contributor to its revenues.  As part of the service contract, Otis often provides maintenance and service-related data to its customers.

The company faced a number of challenges related to its large service and maintenance business.  This case study details how Otis partnered with a leading offshore outsourcing company to create its e*Service solution.  E*Service enabled Otis to utilize the Internet as a cost-effective delivery mechanism and not only reduce its maintenance costs, but also generate additional revenue.

Key Business Challenges

Otis is a global company with multi-location subsidiaries.  It had web presence in mid-90s but Otis offices in each country had its own website and there was inconsistency in terms of content and presentation.  Otis offices in some countries did not have web presence at all due to budgetary and technological hurdles.  Therefore, Otis embarked on an initiative to create a global website to support various countries/languages and bring about some standardization and consistency.  Adding a new country/language to this website is as simple as selecting a checkbox.  To realize real business benefits, Otis offered various tools/applications for Customers and Otis Internal users.  One of the most important offerings is e*Service.

The service business is a major revenue contributor for Otis.  Otis has service contracts with its customers for maintenance and servicing of elevators.  In some cases Otis has to provide customers with maintenance and service-related data as part of contractual obligation.  Sales Representatives used to spend considerable amount of time in digging through complex legacy systems.

Otis also realized that with sharing data with directly with customers would speed data delivery and thereby enhance customer service.

As a solution, the client wanted to use the Internet to provide maintenance and service related data. It aimed to offer the following under e*Service:

·        Performance and maintenance details of customer’s elevators

·        Placement and Review of Service calls

·        Electronic Bill Presentment and Electronic Statement Presentment

Selection Process

A number of factors influenced the client’s decision to go with Wipro Technologies for this important project:

·          Customer Satisfaction:  Client was very satisfied with the results of an earlier project, Product Cost database, completed by WIPRO.  Customer confidence helped Wipro Technologies in winning the new e*Service project against competition from a top 5 consulting firm.

·          Breadth and depth of skills of the WIPRO consultants

·          Quality:  World’s First SEI CMM Level 5 Software Services Organization

·          Price:  Cost effective solution using onsite-offshore model

·          Reliability, being one of the premier software consulting firms in India

Approach

Requirements:

WIPRO needed to understand in-depth the various parameters involved in monitoring the performance of elevators.  WIPRO collated massive (50GB-80GB) amounts of historic maintenance data from different Otis locations and incorporated a daily data feed into the GDR.  Using the e*Service portal, this information was presented to customers in more than 50 countries speaking more than 27 languages in their localized format and currency.  A standardized service report format had to be developed, reviewed and agreed upon among the different entities.  The e*Service portal had to be integrated with Otis.com (Otis’ global web site) and other internal legacy systems.

Project Methodology:

The project started with a system study by an onsite team of Wipro.  This team brought the project details back to offshore.  The development of the first release was executed completely from offshore.  For the subsequent releases, the delivery model was onsite-offshore.  The onsite team consisted of the onsite coordinator and a small support team whereas the offshore team consisted of the project lead and the project team members.  The project delivery model has had an average of 90%-10% offshore-onsite mix.  (This mix has fluctuated over the various releases and phases of the project but on an average, 90% of the amount of development and support work has been executed from offshore.)

The project has followed Wipro quality guidelines during its entire lifecycle.

Communication between onsite and offshore team is through e-mails, weekly and ad-hoc teleconference calls.  Software version control is a very important aspect in such a setup.  Team follows strict use of Visual Source Safe (VSS) for configuration management.  VSS is a central repository, which stores the various versions of development work.  Original and modified versions are stored in VSS.  This is especially required when parallel development is taken up by onsite and offshore teams to collapse development time lines.

Results Achieved

Time to deployment  

Wipro’s large pool of technical personnel ensured that quick team ramp up was one of the contributors to meeting strict delivery schedules.

Development cost savings

Being an offshore model, the cost savings compared to an onsite model were substantial.

Operational savings

Wipro’s solution made Otis’ Internet services very effective and translated into saving Otis Sales Representative as much as 20 minutes per customer viewing, and 2 hours per email report per customer.  On a conservative estimate, e*Service contributed in a 5% increase in efficiency of Sales Representative.

Business benefits

E*service has become a differentiator for Otis and has helped Otis win many large sales and maintenance contracts.   E*Services helps Otis to maintain its competitive position in the marketplace and substantially helps to generate service revenue.

Unexpected benefits

Many countries such as France and the Netherlands have started to sell e*Service subscriptions to customers.  If all units in France go live in e*Service, then the application alone will generate in incremental revenue for Otis.  If all other countries follow suit, then e*Service subscriptions could significantly add to the company’s bottom line.

As a final note, e*Service has received the “Grand Prix de l'Innovation” (grand prize for innovation) award at the recent French Condominium exhibition.

About Wipro Technologies

Wipro Technologies (NYSE:WIT) is a global R&D and IT services organization providing high quality cost-effective solutions to leading companies worldwide.  Wipro combines innovative global delivery models, quality leadership (World's First SEI CMMi Level 5 & PCMM level 5 IT services company) and domain expertise to address the technology needs of global leaders such as:  Home Depot, Microsoft, HP, IBM, GM, AT&T, Cisco, Otis, J.P. Morgan Chase, and others.  For more information, please visit www.wipro.com.

Published:  January 17, 2003