Schindler's optimized technician routes cut 250 offices' planning from two weeks to hours

Schindler Elevator Corporation, the US arm of the world's largest escalator and second-largest elevator maker, maintains tens of thousands of elevators and escalators across North America. Every day thousands of technicians are on the road, and each one's route had to be planned precisely by hand.

Schindler worked with ESRI to build an automated, GIS-integrated route-scheduling system. It applies operations-research techniques to assign maintenance work to technicians and solve the periodic vehicle-routing problem, creating efficient day routes and letting Schindler restructure service areas around dense, balanced workloads.

The measured results: routes for more than 250 offices that took over two weeks to plan are now created in about two hours, with routes optimized to minimize overtime and travel time and balance workload between technicians. The Interfaces paper reports the optimization system saves over $1 million annually.