The Effectiveness of Remote Lift Monitoring with Regards to Lift Reliability

A study was carried out to understand more about whether the lift industry can benefit from the internet of things (IoT); specifically, to understand whether connecting lifts electronically to the internet and then remotely monitoring various elements of the lift can reduce breakdowns, by enabling the service company to identify a maintenance programme that ensures better reliability. Ten lifts were selected that were alike in type, usage and condition to compare similar lifts and rule out any anomalies associated with this. The selected lifts were then fitted with a remote monitoring device (RMD) that connected directly to the lift control panel. Failure mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) was the method used to quantify numerically the effects of lift breakdowns. The lifts were retrospectively analysed 160 days before a remote monitoring system was fitted and 160 days after. With the remote monitoring device fitted, supervisory engineers could influence engineers’ decisions, and to interact with the client. The results were averaged over the 3 sets of data to give an average score. Overall there was a 63% reduction in the number of calls. The data showed that remote monitoring can offer many advantages to managing a lift system in terms of maintenance and reliability, specifically task-based maintenance.