It goes with every innovation: no matter how brilliant it is technically, you still need to market it to find customers. This was the case also with the groundbreaking KONE MonoSpace®, the first machine room-less lift in the world. Once the technology was tried and tested, it was time to introduce it to the world.
The first MonoSpace lifts went to customers in the Netherlands, and they were also manufactured in the same country, where KONE had a factory at the time.
“KONE was the market leader in the Netherlands,” points out Esfandiar Gharibaan. He now works as Vice President, Codes & standards, but 30 years ago, he was the technical director in KONE Netherlands.
“We had a strong connection to KONE’s R&D team in Finland and participated in development of the MonoSpace concept. We had also great engineering capabilities as well as manufacturing facilities in the Netherlands. Above all, the Dutch management was open to innovations and new concepts.”
Besides saving space within the building, MonoSpace was an environmentally sound choice. It used only half of the power needed by comparable conventional systems at the time. Moreover, it used no oil, which removed the risks of soil contamination and fire that were present in hydraulic systems.
According to Gharibaan, the customers in the Netherlands were already environmentally conscious and ready to embrace MonoSpace’s advantages. To symbolise the ecological benefits, it was decided to paint the distinctive KONE EcoDisc® motor green. And since KONE Netherlands had their own product range called Star, MonoSpace was originally launched as “GreenStar”.
One of the very first customers was De Ruiter Seeds, a horticultural company that was building a new facility in the town of Bergschenhoek. De Ruiter Seeds was later acquired by Monsanto, which in turn was acquired by Bayer, and today the facility houses Bayer’s Crop science division, where around 350 people work on developing new vegetable seed varieties. The two MonoSpace lifts installed in 1996 are still taking Bayer's personnel up and down every day.
Naturally, KONE takes care of its equipment with regular inspections and service visits. Bayer’s two MonoSpaces have also been modernised – one in 2014 and the other in 2024 – with a MonoSpace DX Upgrade package to ensure that they will work for many years to come.
In the spring of MonoSpace’s 30-year anniversary, senior maintenance engineer Marco Troost made a regular service visit to Bayer’s facility, making sure that the first MonoSpace units are serving their users well.
Watch the video to see Marco at work and hear his thoughts on these hard-working lifts.