Otisline Case Study

Submitted By sashadion
Words: 705
Pages: 3

1. Being the largest manufacturer, installer, and servicer of elevators, escalators, and moving walkways in the world, Otis achieved huge success in recent years. This case study briefly discussed how IT tools being used by Otis since early 1980s to achieve the significant successes and how Otis turn itself from an engineering and manufacturing company to a service company and achieve its long term vision. As a key fundamental information system, Otis launched its first centralized customer service system, Otisline backed to 1980s, which set the expectations for the customers in the elevator maintenance industry by providing 24 x 7 customer services to its customers from its customer service center. And later in early 2002, the President of Otis, Bousbib set a goal for the company to achieve fivefold improvement in the business cycle, aiming at reducing the business cycle time to achieve consistent delivery of quality products and services to all Otis customers. Multiple change programs for different departments were carried out to make this happens. In order achieve the goal, e*Logistics project was created and provide IT systems to facilitate business transformation in different departments throughout the whole company. It is noted as the most critical enabler for the transformation. In this case study, the details of each change programs for the major departments in Otis are displayed, the key processes and the corresponding elements of the e*Logistics program are discussed and evaluated in details as well as the remaining challenges for the e*Logistics program.

2. Considering Otisline was created more than 20 years ago and it was the first information system Otis launched, it was surely not an easy task for the company. According to Piccoli (2008), organizational information system must consist two components: Social system and Technical system. On the technical system side, back to 20 years ago, the technology was limited, both internet and intranet were at their early development stage, in order to have this 24 x 7 customer service center operating smoothly, certain technologies were crucial important. For example, the data sources for Otis need to be aggregated and communication with the client supposed to be fast. Without an outstanding database, workflow software, intranet and internet, the function of this information system will be quite limited. On the other hand, people were not fully aware of this new system, both the employees and customers. Additional training was required to create the interest of using this new system and ensure employees have the ability to use this new information system. For Otis back to 1990, under the situation that the technology was very limited, the difficulty would be imaginable when the company tried to transform everything that used to be done manually to an automatic system.

3. Mcfarlan and Delacey (2005) mentioned in their study that the pilot projects