Clients

Otis Elevator Rises above Information Overload
Commentary by Jeff Anderson, Senior Manager, E-Business, Otis Elevator Co.

Otis Elevator Co., a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation, is the world’s largest company in the manufacture, installation, and service of elevators, escalators, moving walkways, and other horizontal transportation systems.

We sell approximately 65,000 vertical transportation systems annually—approximately 23 percent of the global new equipment market—and employ over 60,000 people worldwide. Otis maintains more than 1.2 million elevators and escalators backed by a comprehensive range of maintenance, communications, and service dispatching networks which remain unmatched in the industry.

Challenges Faced

•	Urgent need to transform flat files into useful reports
•	No way to capture and report on clickstream data
•	Needed to combine clickstream data and historical information into one complete report

The launch of our sophisticated Web site, www.otis.com, transformed the way we serve our global customer base. But it also brought with it an information challenge. In March 2000 we began thinking about a way to capture and report on critical clickstream data to gain insight to our online customer needs and requirements, which in turn would enable Otis to strengthen its customer relationships.

The company pushed the envelope in offering sophisticated personalization options on our Web site, including computer-aided design drawings of elevators, allowing users to manipulate those drawings while on the site to fit their unique requirements for a particular hoistway. Adding to our challenge was the fact that the Otis site is available in 27 languages and receives about 1,800 visits per day. And with more than 27,000 registered users and Web logs generated daily, we needed a way to find out what our users are looking at and put this data together.

We integrated business intelligence from Cognos® and Web analytics to deliver customer intelligence data and develop trend reporting. The solution allows us to create the critical association of a particular kind of user to particular Web content. Based on the data analysis, we’re able to develop ways to enhance customer service. We chose Cognos because the company had the best breadth and depth of analysis we were looking for.

Benefits Realized

•	Reduced dependence on internal IT resources
•	Important customer data available to Otis offices worldwide at any time
•	Ability to differentiate from the competition

Using Cognos reporting and analytic solutions, we can push the rich clickstream data into multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes, allowing for sophisticated reporting and analysis of the volumes of data collected 24 x 7.

Our goal as a company is to get as close as possible to our customers and what they are doing. The Cognos solution enabled us to unite the Web site traffic information with customer data from other parts of the business, giving a complete analysis and understanding of our customer base. And because this information is available to Otis offices worldwide 24 x 7, there has been a marked decrease in the number of requests for one off reports.

Finally, the reports and information we can extract using Cognos give us the ability to understand how to configure the company’s Web site, change the site, facilitate our email campaigns, and any other outreaches we do. Part of what we’re trying to do is differentiate ourselves from the competition, and use of data and reports is one key aspect. We have a lot of knowledge and data in this company and we are starting to understand the value of it. That’s why having a good suite of BI tools is so important.

Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5404