warranty

Syndicated from B-Eye-Network Some time ago I was at a warranty conference and there was an interesting discussion about registration cards. You know, those postcard sized mailers you are asked to return to register your product. They often have all sorts of demographic and interest questions – asked by the company to flesh out its [...]

I got a chance to chat with some folks from SAS about their text analytics. SAS’ Business Analytics framework contains an Analytics component and within this exists a set of products from SAS such as Enterprise Miner and Model Manager as well as a set of capabilities like Operations Research, Forecasting and Text Analytics. The [...]

I am spending some time as a guest of SAS this week and we got started today with Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. He began by describing SAS Institute’s 33 years of continuous revenue growth as well as similarly growing reinvestment in R&D. SAS has not laid anyone off this year, for which kudos, and [...]

I saw ServiceBench when I presented at the Warranty Chain Management Conference and got a chance to get a more detailed presentation just recently. ServiceBench is aimed at the Service Supply Chain and is now part of NEW (who also presented at the conference). The service supply chain is often very complex because of the [...]

Warranty Week (Computer Warranty Trends, 26 March 2009) had an interesting article this week about the rising rate of warranty claims in computer companies: While other industries are seeing claim rates rise and accrual rates fall, warranty providers in the computer industry are seeing claims rise slightly and accruals rise a lot This prompted me [...]

Josh Becker of SubZero Wolf and Dave Froning of SAS presented on integrating text analytics and data analytics to make an impression. Text analytics has a lot of potential but success stories are not as widespread as you would think they should be nor are there many stories of operationalizing text analytics. The challenge, Dave [...]

Kevin Hogan of Accenture talked about how implementing a warranty system can drive harmonization and competitive advantage.  His focus was on a recent case where they helped a company implement an SAP-based Warranty solution. The case is a global heavy equipment manufacturer with about a focus on Europe and North America. They were running 4 [...]

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 [...]

Doug Maddox discussed how Chrysler has worked on warranty waste and performance measures to help prevent and eliminate it. In the past, Chrysler had relied on Expense per Unit Repaired to monitor dealers but this was easily manipulated (high cost repairs could be hidden) and it drove adverse behaviors because dealers would refuse to perform [...]

Jeff Moore from General Electric and Greg Spraker from SAS (see my review of the SAS Warranty product here) spoke on using analytics to find and eliminate fraud in claims. GE’s appliance division dealt with paper claims prior to 2003 and randomly selecting claims for audit. Between 2003 and 2005 they increased the number of [...]

This is my presentation so there’s no blog about it. Here are my slides: Don’t forget to check out the white paper I have at decisionmanagementsolutions.com/warranty

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 [...]

Glen Griffths gave an update on the Institute of Warranty Chain Management. Glen freely admitted that his purpose was to sell the Institute of Warranty Chain Management and, in particular, the membership benefits of the institute. ICWM costs just $125 for individual members which, as he pointed out, is not much compared with the $72B [...]

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 [...]