Autodiallers for an Educational Establishment

The brief

An educational establishment was looking for a new lift maintenance contractor. Pickerings Lifts tendered for the work and has been managing the lifts on campus for the last five years.

The challenge

From taking the contract on it had become apparent that the educational establishment did not have a fully functional emergency autodialler unit. At the start of the contract, many of the lifts use closed protocol type autodiallers from a variety of manufacturers, this created a series of challenges related to testing, activating communication from the car and accepting calls by the security staff.

Working together, the facilities management team and Pickerings Lifts created and completed a specific program of works to replace the closed protocol autodiallers with new open protocol types,reducing the variety across the portfolio to two manufacturers.

The work

We identified several units such as the KONE Monospace and Otis Gen 2 Lifts which had a dedicated wiring loom designed to connect the original closed protocol autodialler to the lift car operating station (emergency call button, call status pictograms and speaker.)

Working with our autodialler suppliers, we acquired bespoke wiring looms that enabled the new autodiallers to be connected directly to the existing buttons, pictograms and speaker without changing the lift operation or aesthetics.

We identified several autodialler units were approaching two years old. As we could not verify continued battery reliability beyond this point, we approached the facilities management team and proposed to replace all autodialler units’ batteries with new.

We identified and collaborated a list of all the autodiallers batteries. Replacing all the batteries at once enabled us to create a date stamp and future maintenance programme for the autodialler battery replacement. To better support this when we installed each battery, we attached a sticker with a date of installation marked on it.

The achievement

We successfully installed an autodialler system that we can test from our regional offices, to ensure ongoing reliability.

We had identified the importance of checking and maintaining the lifts emergency alarm autodialler system and have a dedicated a specific section of every maintenance visit to accommodate this.

During each maintenance visit, our engineers are prompted via their tablet to test the lift emergency alarm and autodialler, they enter the results which are then recorded on to our lift management system and reproduced on the report that is sent to the facilities management team.