Customer centricity was an early lesson for Judy Marks, who grew up helping her father in his shop. “It was a small store and every day we discussed the business when dad came home. My two older siblings and I, we all worked in the store. We learnt the value of customer service. More importantly we learnt the value of how people do business with people.” This, she said, is helping in her mission to run a $12.3-billion company in start-up mode. Ms. Marks, in October 2017, took over as president of Otis Elevators Co., the 165-year old firm whose founder invented the elevator. Excerpts from an interview:
The global economy is recovering. What are your challenges and opportunities now?
We’re excited by what we see in the economy throughout the world; especially here in India, we see demand picking up. We see stabilisation in some of the financial [metrics] and the economics here.With [growing] economies comes the opportunity to be able to serve retail customers, our industrial customers, and importantly our commercial and housing customers.
What challenges accompany recovery? In the last 7-8 years, large economies have been struggling...
When you have either stable or declining economies, you always have an opportunity to evaluate your strategies and your investments. We spend time trying to understand where the potential pockets of growth would be, what the demand signal would look like, how to optimise both our portfolio and our manufacturing capabilities. But, most importantly [we evaluate] how to invest for the digital economy we are in today.
What potential do you see in the Indian market?
The opportunity to us is very real because we believe the Indian market can best be served by our localised India footprint. We have the largest service base here and a service portfolio [which is] at about 70,000 units in the country. We view ourselves as a ‘Make in India’ [company]. And because of that I had an opportunity to visit our Bengaluru factory as well as our R&D facility in Hyderabad, and our lead office in Mumbai. We have 80 service locations and close to 3,000 employees.
We have continued to assess and implement our localisation [initiatives]. We are proud to now manufacture escalators and our Gen2 product. We are excited about rolling out our Made in India escalator product, which will be coming off our lines in the next few months from Bengaluru.
A lot of metro rail projects are being executed here...
Infrastructure obviously appeals to our elevator and escalator business in general. We are a company that moves people and every day in the world we move two billion people across our products. And here in India, we think that can change the way of life. We work with our customers who can provide, with our technology, a better passenger experience. They may be architects, general contractors, developers, the government, and then obviously our service contractors or building managers.
What is your investment plan for India?
We are committed to our Bengaluru manufacturing facility. We’ve also grown our presence in Hyderabad in terms of professional engineers who are very much a part of our Internet of things and digitalisation strategy.
Our factory here is focused on providing the best products, again using local content, local suppliers that we can provide both here and eventually someday for export. India is an important node for our manufacturing network and we find the talent here to be wonderful.
Otis has been in India for the last 100 years. The first Otis elevator was installed 125 years ago. But now it is not the market leader. How do you plan to regain top slot?
We are very proud of [our history] and not only did we create the industry here in India but 165 years ago Elisha Otis created the first safe elevator. And with that comes pride and responsibility of being able to support not only cities being built, but rising above four and five floors. We have now for the past several years gained market share every year.
It starts with focusing on customers and understanding the markets we are going to serve. We believe that that quality and that personal relationship and innovation will be key to securing customers. Our approach to a ‘connected’ elevator that allows for a different passenger experience, providing more safety for our mechanics and riding public is important. All this is part of our strategy to become a leading digital industrial company.
You said your mission is to run Otis as a start-up.
We have 68,000 employees globally. With that comes the opportunity to lead and be local everywhere. We have 33,000 mechanics making 1,20,000 visits to customers every day.
They have the opportunity to see where they can add value and make improvements. We should be able to take that information, fuse that, understand where customers’ needs are going, predict that and get there first. That’s what start-ups do. They look at things from a different perspective.
They offer solutions that haven’t even been applied to certain industries. That’s the spirit I am trying to instil in all of our colleagues. Yet, in our industry you have to balance that, because we are in a life safety business. We don’t have the opportunity to just write a software app and allow that to control an elevator without regulation or safety. So we have to balance [against] that.
