Lift maintenance is where committees most reliably make a decision that looks prudent in the minutes and costs money for the next decade. The choice is presented as two quotes, one roughly half the other, for what appears to be the same visit schedule. It is not the same thing at all.
What the two contracts actually cover
A non-comprehensive contract buys you labour. The technician arrives, diagnoses, and then quotes for parts. A comprehensive contract buys you labour and parts, which transfers the risk of a failure from the building to the vendor.
That transfer is the whole point, and it changes the vendor’s incentives in a way that no amount of supervision replicates. Under a non-comprehensive contract, a worn component is a future revenue opportunity. Under a comprehensive one, it is a future cost the vendor pays. You will be astonished how much more preventive attention a door operator receives when the vendor owns the downside.
The arithmetic
Take a two-lift residential building. The non-comprehensive contract saves a meaningful amount each year. Now price one door operator replacement, one controller card, and one rope set across five years — a conservative expectation for lifts past their eighth year. In every building where we have run this comparison against actual invoices, the accumulated parts spend under the non-comprehensive contract exceeded the premium on the comprehensive one, usually by a wide margin, and that is before counting the days of downtime.
What we insist on in the contract
- A defined response time for a trapped-passenger call, separate from the response time for a general fault, with a penalty attached.
- An exclusions list that is explicit and short. “Consumables” and “wear items” without definition make a comprehensive contract non-comprehensive.
- Obsolescence handled openly — if the controller is end-of-life, that belongs in the capital plan, not in a series of surprise invoices.
- A signed service log kept at the building, not just at the vendor’s office.
- Statutory lift inspection and licence renewal explicitly assigned to one party.
The one case for going non-comprehensive
A lift within its first three or four years, still under manufacturer warranty on major components, in a low-traffic building. Outside that window, we have not found a building where the saving survived contact with reality.
The same logic applies to DG sets, pumps, and STP plants. Wherever the failure is expensive and the vendor controls the preventive work, buy the contract that makes the vendor pay for failure.