Managing parts warranties is critical to customers and to their bottom lines.  Many parts carry one year warranties.  Higher end products tend to carry 5 year, 10 year, or even lifetime warranties.  The cost of neglecting the warranty periods for purchased items can add up to a substantial amount of money in unnecessary spending.

In order to accommodate this need, we manually reviewed parts history for each location when parts were ordered to ensure that the part was not under warranty.  This took at least thirty seconds per call, and was a highly inefficient, but necessary process.  We needed to find a way to automate this process.

Parts Warranties – Filling The Management Need

We wrote an in-house software program that automatically alerts the Technical Service Representative (TSR) if a part is within the warranty period when it is ordered.  If the part that the TSR orders is a replacement for a part that has shipped within the part’s warranty period, then the system identifies the call(s) and allows the TSR to review the call(s) to see if the part was ordered for the same door.  In order for the part to be marked as a non-warranty item, a reason code must be selected as to why the warranty is not valid.  This information is then easily visible to accounting to ensure that the warranty accounting process is followed.

The system also allows us to generate warranty reports both for customer use and internal use.  It allows customers to see how much they have saved in warranties for any given time period.  In addition, the reports enables us to identify parts that may have consistent problems.  These issues can then be addressed with the manufacturer, or alternate products can be sourced.

Parts Warranties – Time Savings

Having an automated process that generates reports also enables us to be more competitive with bids for new business.

The automated system saves around twenty seconds per service call, which amounts to approximately 3 weeks of work annually for our service department.  It allows us to process each call faster with higher quality than was previously attainable.

It also lowers errors in missing warranty claims by reducing the human element in the process.  If a location has a long service history, calls with parts warranties calls easily be looked over; however, the system now does the work for the TSRs and ensures that each possible warranty call is presented for review.  TSRs cannot skip the process due to the fact that they must select a reason code if the call is not a warranty call.

Through the warranty reporting, we were able to identify a few select parts with high warranty claims and have worked with the manufacturers to correct the quality issues.

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