Focus and Control

A well-known woman in our industry said, “There are always times of uncertainty. What I tell my team is to remain calm and focus on what we can control.” This was Otis CEO Judy Marks in a recent issue of Semafor. I think you need nerves of steel to “stay calm and carry on” but, if you refocus, it can make a huge difference. Look around you and identify those things that are not changing, decide how you can improve them, strengthen them or automate them.

Recently, a graphic designer who laid out our magazine each month resigned, planning a return to school and a career change. Before we could replace her, a former ELEVATOR WORLD graphic designer said she could help if she could work from her home in Texas. Meanwhile, a corporation in California gave us a price — a really good price — on laying out EW remotely and posting it on our website. I struggled briefly with letting EW get out of our home office. Then I remembered: This is how we used to do it back in the 1960s! And it wasn’t nearly so easy. We had to lug it all by hand to an artist three blocks away. Then, we would ship the artwork on a bus from Mobile, Alabama, to a printer in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, it is all on computer so it doesn’t matter if the artist is in Texas or California or Maine. How lucky we are that, in a time of uncertainty, we have so many options we can control.

Right now, there is great uncertainty on the ground in our industry. According to Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), approximately 80% of suppliers have notified contractors of tariff-related material price increases, and 20% have had projects paused or interrupted. Many expect a decline in profits. Still, construction backlog jumped to 8.5 months. Focus on what you can control — how you educate your technicians, how you perform maintenance, how you support safety. What you have control over is how you perform in the job.

Appropriately, this is the People Issue, where we highlight vertical-transportation (VT) industry professionals whose friends and colleagues have nominated them for recognition. I never know who those people are until the last moment, and I love the surprise of it. This year, there are people from every area of the VT industry. Their names — and their lives — are familiar to us. A few are strangers I can’t wait to meet, many are friends and one, I “skipped class” with in Prague! You know who you are!

Speaking of people in the industry, we have a feature this month on Greg DeCola — three of them, grandfather, father and son — all spending their lives in the NYC elevator industry.

We have an excellent continuing-education piece this month from John Koshak, Maintenance on New Equipment Designs: Ascending Car Overspeed and Unintended Car Movement Protection, Controllers and Listing and Labeling. He explains the code that applies to these three items and the novel changes brought about by machine-room-less equipment.

We also focus this month on Environmental Issues. Three articles are included. One is about protection from pit flooding. Another is a study of the uses of digital twins, particularly in the case of seismic activity. The twin can give accurate predictions of how the elevator(s) may act in response to earthquakes. And finally, there is an article from the U.K. about adding fire protection to elevators in a nursing home. 

If you just can’t go an issue without some AI, we have two technical articles that are really fascinating: One is by Dr. Ali Albadri, Temperature Phase Plan Map and Poincare Section for Escalators. It produces pages of unexpected artwork. Another is the Application of Fuzzy-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning in AI for Elevator Group Control by Meysam Talebi. This is a simplified course on how AI can be taught what elevator technicians need it to learn.

We cover several events from early spring, including the National Association of Elevator Contractors Spring Education Conference in Hilton Head, South Carolina; the 42nd Heilbronn Elevator Days meeting in Germany and the Elevator Conference of New York’s Supplier Showcase, which this year included a new networking extravaganza on a Manhattan rooftop. All events were well attended. 

We hope you enjoy this issue. It has a little something for everyone — from AI to fuzzy logic to digital twins — to help you focus on the future. If you love it, let me know, and if you don’t, I am still glad to hear from you at [email protected].