Warranty offers customer value, allows differentiation within competition, and costs money. For instance, customers may get an unconditional right to return products, or a seven years warranty. Prerequisite for both is a high level of quality and reliability.
These levels vary considerably between companies. Today reliability levels may be some failures per 100 cars, some failure percentage in case of technical durables, some percentage of departure delays longer than 15 minutes in case of airlines, some ppm (parts per million) failures in case of automotive supply, or one fatal airplane failure after one million flying hours. Warranty costs may exceed some percentage of turnover, or sometimes ruin the company.
Occasionally customer and competitors change their behavior with regard to warranty, which requires an answer by the company. Beyond that you may improve customer perception of quality and reliability, or you may offer an extended warranty, or reduce warranty costs.
We provide you with advice to improve benefits and costs of warranty and to reach a new reliability level. Some examples:
- Development and implementation of a competitive strategy
- Development and implementation of a quality strategy
- Enhancement of look-and-feel of products
- Reduction of quality escapes
- Uplift of reliability level
- Improvement of R&D quality
- Enhancement of warranty process
- Risk management down to technical root cause also at suppliers
- Reduction of warranty costs
- Optimization of product line to avoid returns
- Identification of unusual warranty costs
We use Statistical Engineering for optimization, Innovation Engineering for risk minimization of warranty.