March 14, 2025 The Winning Edge in Elevator & Escalator Manufacturing

Focusing on product configuration data can help elevator, lift and escalator manufacturers overcome industry challenges.

By Daniel Joseph Barry, vice president of product marketing, Configit

Manufacturers of lifts, escalators and elevators face multiple challenges today. These include varied safety standards; high maintenance, installation and service costs; and the demand for energy-efficient solutions in the midst of urbanization.

These manufacturers must adapt to remain competitive. This means meeting customer expectations of seamless, error-free online purchasing experiences with interactive product visualization – all while controlling expenses. Manufacturers also need data and insights to improve service efficiency and profitability, while ensuring compliance with various local regulations and standards.

Meeting all these demands requires efficient management and access to reliable data on product variants and configurations, and this is exactly what Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) provides.

Consumer demands and the ETO trap

Manufacturers are experiencing increasing consumer pressure to provide energy-efficient products and solutions. Makers of elevators, lifts and escalators must shift their systems and processes accordingly. That creates a complex scenario for developing, making, installing and servicing this equipment.

In addition, when these manufacturers create products requested by their customers, they are typically customized. While customization is great for meeting exacting customer needs, it is costly in terms of engineering resources and time.

This is why companies want to move away from an “Engineer to Order” (ETO) to a “Configure to Order” (CTO) business model. Even a partial CTO strategy dramatically reduces cost and delivery time. CLM supports hybrid ETO/CTO business models, allowing manufacturers to migrate from ETO to CTO by standardizing components where it makes sense. However, CLM leaves room for ETO on the rare occasion that it’s still necessary.

How CLM can help manufacturing

Adopting a CLM approach creates a “shared-source-of-truth” on product configuration options. It enables collaborative design among engineering, manufacturing, sales and service to ensure all relevant options and rules are included in the product model. This allows manufacturers to identify recurring requests for similar features and capabilities that can be standardized, enabling a CTO approach. Manufacturers can thus plan their migration based on reliable, centralized data. This means that each time a customer places an order, the manufacturer doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

CLM provides a reliable source of information on available product options as well as configurations ordered. This means that the post-sales, service and maintenance functions can become a profit center for elevator manufacturers instead of a cost center. Knowing the precise configuration of a lift, elevator or escalator makes service calls faster because technicians always arrive with the right parts. This also affords opportunities to guide customers regarding updates and upgrades for existing products, and to cross-sell.

CLM helps lift and elevator manufacturers gain these advantages:

Lower cost of customized solution development – By reusing standardized configurable components, it is possible to develop a customized solution faster while minimizing the need for customized engineering design and development.

Error-free sales process – CLM enables a “shared-source-of-truth” with up-to-date information sourced from all relevant systems. Since only valid configurations are made available to the customer, it is impossible for customers to order an invalid configuration. Additionally, market availability rules enable manufacturers to manage where and how specific product options are made available.

Faster quotes, more business – ETO-based customized solution quotes can take weeks. By adopting a CTO approach where possible, quote times are dramatically reduced. Complex quotations can be generated in minutes, leading to more satisfied customers and a lower cost of quotations that never turn into orders.

Post-sales service that’s cost-effective – The centralized “shared-source-of-truth” includes maintenance and service, which have traditionally been hard to predict and manage. Unscheduled maintenance and service are expensive; with CLM, it is possible to customize both the solution and the service agreement.

Faster maintenance – When part of a product is broken, CLM enables service technicians to quickly check the customer’s specific configuration. This allows them to see if there are spare parts available and which one(s) are needed, even before visiting the customer.

Better compliance – With CLM, it is possible to create rules to ensure compliance with the variety of regional and global industry and safety regulations. In addition, data privacy regulations now have more punitive costs for breaches. Manufacturers are required to disclose a software vulnerability within a matter of days of discovery. If their CLM has analysis capabilities, they can quickly find which products have that vulnerable software and alert customers in a compliant manner.

Advantage: CLM

It’s noble to want to customize every elevator or escalator for customers, but in today’s world of accelerated building schedules, increasing regulatory requirements and the need for cost-efficiency, it’s not a viable business plan. CLM enables manufacturers to plan migration from ETO to CTO and empowers them to overcome the many market challenges that manufacturers of complex and configurable products face – regaining time and money in the process.

About the Author
Daniel Joseph Barry is vice president of product marketing at Configit the global leader in Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions and a supplier of business-critical software for the configuration of complex products. He has over 30 years of experience in the Telecom and IT industry, working in various technical and commercial roles.

Educated as an electronic engineer, he progressed from research and system development roles to leadership roles in business development, sales, product management, marketing and strategy in global multinationals like Ericsson, as well as startup and growth companies. After several years as an independent consultant, he joined Configit in 2023 in a role that leverages all his experience in articulating the value that CLM and Configit can provide, as well as providing insight into market needs.

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