ELEVATORS
GOING UP
How the elevator industry is helping ensure a safer, healthier experience for CRE By: Kevin Robertson, EVP Sales, North America, TK Elevator According to a McKinsey Global Survey of executives, COVID-19 increased the adoption of digital technologies by several years, and many of these technological changes are here to stay. And just in time. In order to ensure a healthy return to buildings, property managers have needed to demonstrate a healthy commitment to those tenants, occupants and visitors relying on them to keep them safe. Prior to the pandemic, the elevator industry began implementing digital technologies that limited touch points. Dispatching systems were being adopted where tenants and guests would simply input their floor destination into a lobby kiosk, and the elevator would be selected for them and other passengers with similarly located destinations. Now, as property managers seek to eliminate touch points, passengers can simply use an app via their smartphone or wearable device to make their floor selection. The technology has the capability to recognize a specific tenant once they enter a building and, based on the information previously provided to their profile, will have an elevator automatically selected for them and take them to their destination. The elevator industry is also prioritizing data and IoT to ensure smarter building management by providing actionable intelligence that improves operational efficiency. The most prevalent is the increased acceptance and inclusion of predictive maintenance technology that can diagnose a building problem or elevator issue before one occurs, while also providing elevator usage data that helps property managers understand building traffic patterns to run their facilities more efficiently. For example, according to data from TKE’s IoT connected elevators in the greater Atlanta area, elevator traffic in office buildings was up 26% in January 2022 compared to January 2021, but still was 61% below pre-pandemic levels. By comparison, elevator traffic in residential buildings in the greater Atlanta area was up 18% in January 2022 compared to January 2021 but only 16% below prepandemic levels. This insight, not possible as recently as five years ago, has forever changed how buildings will be managed moving forward.
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Insight • Issue 1 2022
And while the pandemic has inspired a variety of tech enhancements in the elevator industry, it also exposed another area that needed heightened focus – health and wellness.
A HEALTHIER APPROACH An AIA report from 2020 found that 79% of architects want to specify more sustainable materials than they do today – 97% among millennials. And while these architects recognize they hold responsibility for sustainability in the built environment, yet only onethird feel they are meeting that responsibility today. Also, less than two-thirds of architects use product certificates and disclosures like Cradle to Cradle, Declare labels, Health Product Declarations (HPDs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to determine whether a product is sustainable. That number should be higher, especially at a time when building health and safety is being so closely scrutinized worldwide. Every commercial and residential building supplier and owner should be challenging themselves to provide and implement the healthiest and safest products possible. For elevator companies, that starts with gaining a better understanding of the material ingredients used to create their products and their impacts on human health and the environment. One positive step is for elevator companies to disclose the materials within their products. Material ingredient disclosure begins with a discovery process of truly learning about what chemicals and components are in the products a manufacture creates and from where those materials are coming. With the information, manufacturers can compare to hazardous chemical lists to understand how their product may be contributing to the overall health of the building and take action to improve. Congruent with material transparency, elevator companies can drive environmental transformation by developing an EDP on their products. An EPD is a third-party verified objective report that communicates what a product is made of and how it impacts the environment across its entire life cycle – from material extraction and production to shipping, use and disposal. EPDs are meant to help better inform companies on how they can improve product design,
