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manufacturing

Rob Pritchard of Infosys presented on the power of business rules in warranty. His focus is on agility – most warranty systems are inflexible and hard to change. Organizations cannot make changes to warranty policy to respond to competitors, can’t create what-if scenarios, can’t tighten claims control or pre-valid claims or repairs. These problems come [...]

Terry Adams of Ingersoll Rand, the parent company of Trane, presented on harnessing and coordinating warranty best practices. IR includes Trance, Thermo King, Schlage, Steelcraft and others for about $17B worldwide. All these acquisitions have experience and systems so Ingersoll Rand has a vision of a Business Operating System to drive common tools and methodology [...]

John Hagen of Trane presented on measuring and improving an effective and efficient warranty process. Trane produces Commercial HVAC systems of every size. Warranty is tricky because they make everything so specific to customers. Trane started a new quality initiative in 2004 because they felt that there were some low hanging fruit. They had warranty [...]

Eric Arnum, editor of Warranty Week, gave an overview of the industry as a whole. Clearly the recession is taking its toll. Starting with new home builders it has spread to RV makers, auto makers, various retailers, GE and others. Warranty is important in many of these company’s challenges and some, like Hyundai, are trying [...]

I am at the Warranty Chain Management conference this week and blogging more or less live. Despite the economy there are over 180 attendees as well as a solid core of sponsors. Marc McKenzie, Global Director of Corporate Warranty & Governance from Hewlett Packard gave the opening presentation on the strategic importance of warranty. HP [...]

First Look Tavant

Some weeks back I got a review on Tavant, a 700 person IT services and solutions company with a focus in financial services (mortgage, trading and security), ebusiness and Service Operations such as warranty management. I was interested in their warranty product as part of my research into the warranty claims space. The product – [...]

Continuing some posts on next generation warranty systems in the build up to speaking at the Warranty Chain management conference I thought I would contrast how current generation warranty systems handle critical decisions with how next generation systems do so. Decision Today Next Generation Is Claim Valid? Data validation rules are coded into the user [...]

I am going to speaking next week at the Warranty Chain Management Conference (registration is still open) on Next Generation Warranty Systems. I hope to post a couple of product reviews (like the SAS Warranty one already posted) this week but I thought I could also talk a little about my topic. The basic premise [...]

SAS Warranty Solutions First Look

Some weeks ago I got a chance to review the SAS Warranty Analysis product. I was doing some due-diligence before my speech on “Next Generation Warranty Systems” to the Warranty Chain Management Conference in April.  The folks from SAS began with an Aberdeen quote from 2006: Warranty analytics is the number one differentiator between Best [...]

First Look – Savvion 7.5

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Ken Vollmer kicked off the last day of the event with a view from the field – a survey on BPM that Forrester did at the end of 2007. The theme is that “BPM has already achieved mainstream status inside of most enterprises but we still have a long way to go to achieve the [...]

Pretty pictures are not enough

I saw this article today on Real-Time Analytics: The Importance of Strategic Alignment and Ease of Use, and it made me think (again) about the danger of pretty pictures. While the article makes some good points about analytics in manufacturing, it seems to me that the author is sucked in to thinking that pretty pictures [...]

Book Review – The world is flat

[amazonify]0374292795:right[/amazonify][amazonify]0374292795::text::::The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century[/amazonify] I have just finished reading “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Firstly a health warning – it’s a REALLY long book. Even skimming some sections it took me a long while to read it. Overall it is a good if somewhat long winded [...]