Smart Elevators, Energy Savings and Opportunity Windows 07-017

The next time you are in New York City, drop into the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square and take a ride up the elevators in the newly renovated lobby. Before you get on, you'll notice something different. Instead of a single button to summon the elevator, there's a keypad. You key in the number of the floor you want, and the computer directs you to a particular elevator. At that elevator  you'll will find a group of people headed to your floor and those close to it. When your smart elevator arrives it whisks you express to your floor and next adjacent floors, instead of taking the "traditional milk-run elevator" having to stop at every floor along the way. Elevator rides will change based on traffic. Building managers like it because it saves energy too, because of the overall shorter rides and fewer stops and starts.

This new generation of “smart elevators” called Miconic 10 is made by Schindler Elevator Corporation. All new high-rise buildings in Manhattan will soon have them.

The system is based on a simple fact: when an elevator contains a group of people going to many different floors, each person’s ride becomes longer than if traveling alone. By sorting people into groups headed to nearby floors, each person’s journey becomes — on average — 50 percent faster.

This concept or the Opportunity Window here could be called "Customer Clustering". Most people reading this story will stop here-likely thinking -what a neat and simple idea. or ...."Why didn't I think of that?" Seasoned or serial entrepreneurs will take it a step further, thinking....how can I transfer this concept of customer clustering into my business environment?

Banks started doing this a decade ago by creating single line-ups (cues) that would direct customers to the next free available teller. Previous to this I would always invariably end up in the line where the patron in front of me would have a half hour of banking to do. Government agencies quickly followed suite.

Where else could "customer clustering" be applied?

In my humble opinion airlines have always done a terrible job of boarding passengers. Boarding from back to front makes intuitive sense but there is a much more efficient way of doing it, using customer clustering as the opportunity window concept.

What happens now? Invariably the aisle seat passenger gets settled  into his/her seat before the window passenger makes it to their place. They then have to unbuckle, stand up to let the late passenger into the middle or window seat, all the while, road blocking all the incoming traffic in the aisle.

I've always said that it makes much more sense to board all window seat passengers from the back to the front first, followed by middle seat passengers, followed by all remaining aisle seat passengers, back to front.

Intrigued and interested in learning and applying this type of thinking in your business or organization? We have over 200 such examples of such generic opportunity windows in our Opportunity Clinic Workshops. Call or write for details.

© 2005-2007

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

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