Supply Chain

Steve Zannos of NEW Customer Service Companies presented on customer loyalty in an industry with lots of third parties involved. NEW provides service support to companies who sell products and works with 30,000 independent service agents – everything from single technicians to large depots to national networks. They try to drive customer loyalty through this [...]

Frank Kozlowski of Kohler presentedf on a web-based warranty system. When they set out to develop the system their goals were to move to a start-of-the-art, easy to use system that was web-based so dealers could enter claims directly anywhere in the world (they have 12,000 dealers). They wanted to reduce their cycle time from [...]

Jim Johnson of IBM gave IBM’s point of view on quality lifecycle management. Jim works in Global Services and works with auto and truck manufacturers. IBM’s research shows: That warranty reserves accrue at between 1% and 3% of sales and this is continuing to increase. Detection to correction cycles average over 100 days and can [...]

Kjell Hammerstrom of Sun presented on warranty costs. Product management teams specify warranty term duration and terms of warranties on products while procurment teams negotiate warranty terms with equipment manufacturers (many of Sun’s products are built by a manufacturer like Qunta, Mitac, Celestica). However the process was not collaborative – products would be released with [...]

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 [...]

Ed Staats of ServicePower presented on how to use an economic downturn to your advantage, streamline service operations and reduce costs. With the current economic downturn many companies feel they cannot make changes but Ed focused on SaaS and managed services as ways to innovate operations without large investments. SaaS is clearly a focus for [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the best things about being at DIALOG was the opportunity to meet a bunch of ILOG customers and learn how they are making better decisions in their organizations. It seems to me that every one of these customers is, in a very practical way, helping to build a smarter planet. The first group [...]

Pierre Haren started up the keynotes with some personal comments about the excitement of being part of IBM, seeing more customers at DIALOG and hearing stories from customers about what they are doing with ILOG products. He is clearly enthused by the opportunity to reach more companies by being part of IBM than they ever [...]

On now to the roadmap, at least at a high level. Right now there is the normal post-acquisition “blue wash” going on and by Q2 will deliver IBM versions of all ILOG’s products and, obviously IBM’s global sales force and Global Services are being spun up. The core of the roadmap is to move the [...]

Getting started at DIALOG I got to spend some time with Tom Rosamilia GM of WebSphere, Sandy Carter and Pierre Haren, CEO of ILOG discussing the ILOG acquisition by IBM. Tom went first by pointing out that the acquisition seemed like a good idea when it was announced and since then the Smarter Planet initiatives [...]

Tom Davenport has done some research into analytics and retail (reported here: Retailers recognise analytics as key to business transformation. Here’s a quote from the new item: Retailers today are searching for ways to derive more customer intelligence, marketing savvy and operational insight from their overflowing databases. In addition to acknowledging that the use of [...]

I got a briefing on IVIS Group’s Sonetto product this week. Sonetto is most famous as the platform for Tesco’s multi-channel strategy. Sonetto is a product designed to focus on multi-channel operations, especially (but not exclusively) multi-channel retail. They make the very valid point that multi-channel retail is complex. Not only do retailers have multiple [...]

Elana Anderson had a great post on direct marketing while I was on vacation –Next Generation Campaign  Management. She starts off with three great principles: Listen to all information provided by customers and prospects – both explicit and implied. Understand past and present information to determine the best possible marketing action. Communicate in a compelling, [...]