Elevator Maintenance Management
Monthly contract visits, entrapment callouts that can't wait, and inspection records that have to be exact. How lift maintenance companies keep on top of all of it.
Lift maintenance is contract work with an emergency service attached. Most of the revenue comes from maintenance contracts, usually a monthly visit per lift. Reputation depends on callouts, though, and most of all on entrapments, when someone is stuck in a car and every minute counts.
The contract visit
A monthly maintenance visit usually covers:
- Check the car and landing doors, door operators and safety edges
- Check levelling at each floor
- Inspect ropes or belts, sheaves and brakes
- Check the controller, alarms and emergency communication
- Lubricate as the manufacturer specifies
- Check the pit and the machine room
- Test the emergency lighting and alarm
- Record findings and anything needing repair
Every engineer should work through the same checklist, and findings should turn into planned repairs instead of notes that get forgotten.
Callouts and entrapments
Callouts need clear priorities:
- Entrapment: top priority, immediate response.
- Lift out of service: urgent, especially in residential buildings and hospitals.
- Fault but still running: scheduled.
The dispatcher needs to know which engineer is closest and qualified on that make of lift, and the building needs to know someone is coming.
Every lift is different
Lifts last a long time and are heavily customised, so each one needs its own record: make, controller type, installation date, capacity, number of floors, and every visit, fault and part since then. That history tells an engineer arriving at an unfamiliar lift what they are dealing with.
Inspections and records
Lifts are usually subject to periodic statutory inspection, and building owners have to keep records of maintenance and inspections. Your visit reports form part of that record, so check that each one is complete, dated and attached to the right lift.
Parts
Door operators, rollers, contacts, sensors and control boards fail most often. Keep the common parts in vans. Specialist parts often have long lead times, so a fault that needs one should become an order and a scheduled follow-up straight away.
What to measure
- Monthly visits completed on schedule, per lift.
- Callouts per lift per year. The worst lifts are candidates for modernisation.
- Entrapment response times.
- Repeat faults within 30 days.
In Movtro
In Movtro each lift is an asset at its building, with make, model, serial number, install date and a full history of visits, faults and status changes. Contract visits run as recurring jobs, usually monthly per lift. They are created ahead of time with the maintenance checklist and flagged when overdue. Callouts are jobs with a priority, and dispatch can get a suggested engineer based on skills, workload, availability and travel time. Engineers fill in checklists, notes, photos and parts on their phone, with or without signal. Inspection certificates and reports can be attached to the lift as documents. Building managers can follow jobs and raise requests through the customer portal.
Movtro does not connect to lift controllers or remote monitoring, and it does not handle contract pricing or invoicing.