The inspection was in two weeks. The building handover was in three. And I was staring at an elevator shaft with no elevator.
I’m a procurement manager for a mid-sized development firm. We manage about $180,000 in annual service contracts—elevators, HVAC, you name it. In Q2 of 2024, I was handling the specs and vendor selection for a new 8-story commercial office building. The timeline was tight but doable… until the general contractor hit a snag with the drywall and pushed everything back by a month.
That’s when the real clock started ticking.
How We Got Here: The Original Plan vs. Reality
We had originally budgeted for a standard delivery and installation schedule with KONE. The quote came in at $[PRICE]—a fair number for a machine-room-less (MRL) system with their Ecodisc® drive. The timeline was 10 weeks from order to operational. It fit perfectly into our old project schedule.
Then the drywall delay hit. Suddenly, our 10-week cushion was a 5-week sprint. The project manager asked if we could “just call them and ask them to speed it up.” I knew that wasn’t how this worked.
I had a choice: stick with the original schedule and miss our opening date by a month, or pay a rush fee and keep the project on track. From a pure cost perspective, the rush option added $4,200 to the contract. That’s a 17% premium on the elevator line item.
The numbers said to wait. “Delay the opening and save $4,200,” the spreadsheet said. But my gut—and my 6 years of tracking every single invoice—said something else.
The Hard Lesson Hidden in the Spreadsheet
To be honest, I almost went with the cheaper option. I’ve been burned by “probably on time” promises before. The third time a vendor told me something would arrive “around the 15th” and it showed up on the 25th, I started building a habit of adding a clause for late delivery penalties. But that doesn’t help when you’re already in a time crunch.
I started running the numbers on what a one-month delay would actually cost:
- Lost rent: The anchor tenant was a law firm with a $15,000/month lease. That’s $15,000 gone.
- GC penalties: The contractor had a late fee clause for every day past the handover date. Rough estimate: $500/day for 30 days = $15,000.
- Reputation: Harder to quantify, but you don’t want to start a relationship with a major tenant by saying “sorry, you can’t move in yet.”
So the math was actually pretty clear: pay $4,200 in rush fees, or risk potentially $30,000 in losses. That “budget option” was actually the expensive one.
I called KONE. They confirmed they could guarantee delivery and installation within 4 weeks for the premium. I asked about their reliability. The sales engineer—a guy named Mark, I think? No, it was Mike—said they’d done similar rush jobs for hospital wing projects before.
The Install: Where the Magic (and the Risk) Happens
The install team arrived on a Tuesday morning. Three guys, a truck, and a lot of cable. The first thing they did was double-check the shaft dimensions. We didn’t have a formal sign-off process for that—something I’d later realize was a gap. It cost us when we found out the door frame was half an inch off, and they had to adjust the mounting brackets on site.
That was the one hiccup. But KONE’s team handled it without slowing down. They had a workaround within an hour. If we had gone with a smaller, less experienced vendor, that half-inch problem could have become a 2-day delay.
By Friday afternoon, the elevator was operational. The inspection passed on Monday. The building opened on schedule.
The Takeaway: You’re Not Paying for Speed—You’re Paying for Certainty
In the world of commercial construction, a lot of people focus on the unit price. I get it—I do the same thing when I’m ordering 500 boxes of light switches. But for mission-critical systems like elevators, the equation changes.
"If you ask me, the rush fee wasn't about getting it done fast. It was about getting it done on time. Period."
Personally, I now budget for a “schedule buffer” line item on every project that has a hard deadline. If you don’t use it, you earn a small cost savings. If you do use it, it saves your entire project.
In my opinion, the extra $4,200 was one of the best procurement decisions I made last year. And I have the data—and the timeline—to prove it.
Note: Pricing and scheduling details are based on my experience as of Q2 2024. Verify current availability and rush fees with your local KONE representative, as prices and timelines may vary.
