Maintenance and Modernization in Türkiye

Hello Everyone,

Periodical maintenance of lifts is the place where various unskillful companies earn their living, but looking and seeing are different, and this is the most disturbing issue in the industry. Those who work as a company head have sometimes established their own company, working in the maintenance and networking arenas after having only a few years of experience at the company. Their calculation is simple: They think that they will earn the same salary by acquiring 100-150 lift maintenance jobs  whether they are qualified or not. They start to make contacts while they still work at the company, and then, they find these jobs not too long after leaving the company. How? They turn the tables on themselves through quite simple ways. Firstly, they start with arranging the contacts of lifts they have provided maintenance for before. Their first conversation is, “I have been working on your projects. You have my phone number. I also offer lower prices. You can give the maintenance job to me. The company has been overcharging you!” This applies to many employees who leave their companies and establish a new one.  This vicious cycle is the main phenomenon that accelerates today’s company inflation. No official document is requested for the maintenance job, only the apartment expense voucher and a simple, invalid periodical maintenance form are considered adequate. This is the current state with a rate of 70% in Türkiye. Such a percentage is a great opportunity for ordinary companies and what we call “backstreet operators.” It poses a quite serious threat to companies that do these jobs properly, have made names in Türkiye and have spent years in this sector. On the other hand, there is no government practice to protect companies that operate by the book (maintenance contract, SSI, income tax, corporate tax payment, etc.). These ordinary companies have become so sloppy about their jobs that, if they do not know anything about the lift they are maintaining, they try to perform maintenance by asking for fault codes or asking for information on some platforms, especially Facebook. Other curious company employees support them by answering their questions. Don’t do this! Do not give information! Don’t ruin the industry! Those who do not have experience in the business must not work in that way. Do not share price information, especially on such online platforms. There are building owners, managers and those who try to get the work done cheaply on these platforms. You play into such people’s hands whether you want or not.

The same applies to lift modernization. In fact, it is even more troublesome in modernization. In order to get cheap work, products that were used years ago and are still usable are dismantled and replaced with products of much poorer quality, just for the sake of making money. Lifts that should run for 20 or 30 years only run for two to three years, as they are modernized incorrectly. The company thinks that operating for two years is enough for the lift, so, good luck finding that lift operator two years later.

On the other side, I congratulate the companies that duly perform their jobs and try to do the right job for years without compromising on quality. However, they lose their maintenance and modernization work to those who do not know the job since they cannot earn the money they deserve and cannot compete. If we lose these companies, which we can call the minority, we will also lose the educational institutions where we learned the basics of the job. We will depend on the staff who are trained by the backstreet operators who know everything in the wrong way. This will become the biggest problem in the development of the industry.

The situations I mentioned here are not detected . They are the examples that I have experienced and witness in my business life. In order to prevent these, we hope that the relevant Ministry will impose serious penalties on these companies. Penalties should be the last resort, but unfortunately, as long as the mentality of “nothing will happen to me” prevails in our country, we cannot prevent these mistakes.