In India, a promise is a promise – no matter what. Our customer, Roma Builders Pvt. Ltd., the construction company behind the Hiranandani Quantum Project, had assured the future building’s tenants, all high-profile companies, that the Grade A office building would be operational by the end of 2020. So even the COVID pandemic and a two-month nationwide lockdown wasn’t going to derail their timeline. We helped our customer come through on their promise – against all odds.
After the two-month nationwide lockdown, our workers were finally allowed to go back on-site in June 2020 – merely six months away from the deadline. There was no time to lose. We had 16 elevators in total to install, as well as our Schindler PORT system.
To move the project at full speed, two project managers were brought in: Suresh Chile focused on local procurement of resources, while Abdulgaffar Patel oversaw installation activities and on-site logistics.
To stay on the already tight schedule, our installation team worked in multiple shifts, which was no easy task during a time of changing local regulations. To make sure our 60 fitters got enough rest and had easy access to the site, they were put up in local accommodation.
The whole area, Hiranandani Business Park, had been developed by our customer, and we had earned their trust with a previous large project. Our customer offered six flats nearby for our fitters to live in – an act of generosity that went a long way in helping the project move faster.
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Among Quantum’s tenants are some of the most prominent blue-chip companies, banks, and multinational corporations. Inside the 25-story building, an estimated 9,900 white-collar workers and visitors come and go every day. An intelligent management system was therefore a must to provide secure access and ensure a smooth flow of traffic through the building.
To accurately estimate the elevator capacity needed to handle the inflow, outflow, and inter-floor traffic, we carried out a comprehensive traffic simulation, a methodology we’ve practiced since 2007 and which has since been endorsed by ISO as an industry standard. We tailored our offering accordingly – providing 12 Schindler 7000 elevators and four Schindler 5500 elevators, complete with our robust destination control system Schindler PORT.
We also proposed illuminated designation plates, a practical and stylish addition to the landing lobby. Connected with Schindler PORT, the plate above the designated elevator lights up when the car arrives.
For a 12-elevator group running in a densely populated office building, high uptime is paramount. We installed Schindler Ahead Cube, which connects our equipment to the Internet of Elevator and Escalators (IoEE) and sends timely insights to our technicians. This way, technicians get notified of symptoms and can attend to the equipment proactively, so problems are solved before they become issues.
We did encounter a few hurdles along the way: Schindler Ahead Cube usually comes with one antenna, but the connection to the IoEE was not steady enough due to the weak signal of the local SIM card service provider. We probed our Schindler Ahead experts at our headquarters: the issue was solved swiftly by switching to an M2M (machine-to-machine) solution, by using two antennas instead of one.
Schindler Ahead Cube now works like a dream. Not only does it provide relevant data to our technicians through its Remote Monitoring Platform (RMP), but it also offers the opportunity for the building to integrate with an entire suite of digital products.
"Elevators used to be just a steel box, but now customers are expecting so much more," said Ankit Ahuja, Deputy Manager of Digital Business India, who has been in the IoT (Internet of Things) business for more than a decade. "We’ve been applying Schindler Ahead since 2018," he said. "So, as we’d like to say, we’re literally ahead."