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Otis' Elevator Network Reaches New Heights By Mona R. Litt When people scurry through New York's Penn Station during rush hour or marvel at the breathtaking sights at Paris' Eiffel Tower, they rarely notice what transports them up and down those buildings. Otis Elevator Co., of Farmington, Conn., installs elevators, escalators and other horizontal transport systems throughout the world so that people can experience the daily highs and lows in life. Because most Otis mechanics and salespeople work remotely, the company c hose a frame relay and SNA wide-area network with a Novell NetWare LAN. "Our focus is to accommodate all employees not permanently connected to our network with everything our network has to offer," says Wesley Zinn, Otis Elevator's manager of field information systems. Mechanics use Motorola KDT 840 handheld radio frequency (RF) devices to keep in touch with their offices and various service calls. These small components display three lines of text along with the page, according to Zinn. Those paged can respond with short typed messages sent to an IBM Corp. 9021 mainframe. OtisLine software centrally tracks this information and logs it to the mainframe database. Mechanics can access service histories on clients and report details of that day's visits. Salespeople depend on the Otis Automated Sales Information System (OASIS) on their notebook PCs for constant updates on product and cust omer information. XcelleNet RemoteWare Communication Management System and Application Management System provides t he access to files and applications, such as Microsoft Office. Zinn says he plans to make OASIS, as well as the Otis Maintenance Management System (OMMS), available to field management by January 1998. OMMS lets employees schedule elevator maintenance and develop manpower schedules. Folio Views houses all documents in an easily searchable document management system. Otis' Remote Elevator Monitoring lets modems placed in elevator machine rooms dial into OtisLine, according to Zinn. If there's a breakdown, an alert is immediately forwarded to the IP server. The OtisLine alarm automatically dispatches messages, which show up on a dispatcher's screen. The dispatcher then contacts mechanics. Otis secures its network with IDs and passwords, algorithm locking and encryption, Zinn says, and also uses some back-end firewalls from its parent company, United Technologies Co.
"Our direction for the future is to provide users independent of the [main] office with all the network has to offer," Zinn says. O
tis plans to install CDPD modems in all elevators by September 1997 to become less proprietary. Zinn expects to extend the company's intranet to all employees by using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) on an AT&T IAS network. He also plans to extend remote-access connections to field management personnel by January 1998. See Otis' Web site (www.elevator.com) for more details on its products and history.
Updated August 8, 1997 
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