Warranty Lifecycle

Best-in-class companies use an end-to-end warranty lifecycle approach. Warranty management is not just about claims entry, payment and accounting for the warranty costs. Warranty lifecycle means connecting all warranty activities including product or contract registration, claims processing, parts return, supplier recovery, warranty analysis, and quality improvement. Connecting these processes within warranty lifecycle enables these companies to streamline the processes, increase supplier collaboration and improve product quality resulting in significant warranty cost reductions.

Business Rules

Once these various warranty processes are connected, it is important to automate the processes reducing the manual intervention while improving the accuracy of data being captured. The key enabler to drive high levels of automation is the use of intelligent business rules and work flow capabilities.  Warranty processing involves resolving numerous questions and making many decisions. Questions such as -

Is this failure covered under warranty?
Is the data valid & complete?
Which supplier is responsible?
What policy and reimbursement terms apply?

By using business rules to make these decisions consistently and accurately, it is possible to achieve 80-85% automation of claims adjudication, supplier claim generation and other warranty processes..

Abstracting the business rules and making them accessible to business users enables the warranty departments to easily modify these rules and processes as the business changes.

Warranty Analytics

Once more accurate registrations, claims, returns and supplier claim data is available, companies can realize better value by gaining actionable insights about warranty. Many companies today rely heavily on their IT teams.  Creating reports becomes a cumbersome exercise removed from the business users.  . Implementing integrated warranty analysis tools improves access to warranty information in real time by all stakeholders.

Having a centralized data warehouse and correct metrics helps identify contributing factors for warranty costs, supplier & dealer performance and many other aspects of warranty performance. Integrating transactional data to the analysis provides a single source of data for the whole enterprise. Groups other than the warranty group, such as   engineering, manufacturing and quality, can now directly analyze the data to help identify areas of product improvement reducing the cycle time for detecting and correcting emerging issues.

Service Contracts 

Most companies are not maximizing the potential of additional service revenues and profits from increasing extended warranty, maintenance or other service contracts from their existing customer base. Service contracts capability within the end-to-end solution can lead to an improved service revenue stream and profitability.

The capabilities beyond standard warranty management that can help are

(a) Program and price configuration,
(b) Quoting and contract registration and
(c) Contract profitability & pricing analysis.

The ability to configure service offerings and present the right options to customers based on their specific needs can help companies improve the attach rate of extended warranty and service contracts.

Bridge to Service Lifecycle

Warranty of course is an integral part of overall service or product support management and depends on many common service execution processes. Improvements in warranty management can lead to improvements in service beyond warranty and vice versa. The bridge between warranty and service lifecycle will improve the overall customer experience and satisfaction.

Managing common capabilities like service or dealer network, service parts, technical support and service content will ensure better service execution as well as best in class warranty management. Leveraging these service capabilities will result in increased parts sales as well as improved service profitability for all companies in the service chain.

4CS iWarranty brings all these capabilities in a single package enabling companies to improve warranty and service management quickly and cost effectively.  Please contact 4CS for additional information.?