Warranty Management Services for the Electronics and High Tech Industry

To help electronics and high tech companies become high-performance businesses, Accenture can significantly streamline warranty management by standardizing and institutionalizing claim resolution and automating many activities now completed manually.

Consumer electronics companies are failing to realize millions of dollars in profits because they are:

• Spending too much to administer warranties.
• Missing other important cost-reduction opportunities in the areas of fraud avoidance, supplier recovery and improved product quality.
• Failing to realize the revenue they could generate from the sale of extended warranties that are increasingly popular among consumers.

In addition, warranty management forms part of the overall customer experience—something that is coming to play a vital role in any company’s ability to compete in the competitive global electronics market place.

How would streamlining warranty management affect the bottom line? Consider the case of a hypothetical $10 billion “industry average” consumer electronics manufacturer that spends approximately 3 percent of revenue annually on warranties—$300 million in total warranty expense. Because it is an “average” company, it has limited fraud detection, supplier recovery and product quality analysis capabilities.

Conservative estimates show that this hypothetical manufacturer could cut its spending by nearly half if it adopted Accenture’s integrated, end-to-end approach to warranty management, which forms part of the Accenture Service Repair Effectiveness Solution. It is estimated that this company could reduce administrative expenses by $5 million, save $19 million in fraud reduction and $56 million in supplier recovery costs, and pocket an additional $60 million by detecting and preventing future product issues due to a better understanding of past defects. These savings could be greater if the company outsourced the entire warranty management life cycle to a third party such as Accenture.

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More Information

• Take the Accenture Warranty Management Diagnostic to see how your company’s warranty management and product returns activities compare with your peers.
  
• Find out how to make the most out of your warranty business by reading our white paper: “An End-to-end Strategy for Improved Warranty Management Capabilities” [PDF, 312K]. PDF Help
  
• Read an Accenture survey suggesting that warranty management represents an area of huge untapped business potential.

Accenture offers clients wholly dedicated warranty management services and capabilities that can contribute substantially to your company’s operational effectiveness and ultimately its ability to become a high-performance business.

Accenture leverages its extensive experience in helping clients in the electronics and high tech industries gain competitive advantage and its powerful research-based understanding of high performance in this industry to help improve the warranty-management process. We can help significantly streamline warranty management by standardizing and institutionalizing claim resolution and automating many activities now completed manually. Our professionals have extensive client experience and a strong set of existing, tested methodologies and frameworks for creating value across the warranty-management life cycle. This approach can have a dramatic impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of warranty management to reduce costs—and provide a better client experience, thus building loyalty.

Using robust analytics software, decision makers can monitor product performance and not only resolve known product issues more quickly, but also determine ways to improve the quality of future products—thus helping to reduce future warranty exposure.

A consolidated warranty information data warehouse can give a manufacturer access to comprehensive warranty and customer data, which enables it to tailor marketing campaigns to specific customer segments; identify new types of warranties and service plans; and manage its warranty pricing more sharply.

New processes can enable a manufacturer to quickly and more accurately determine the veracity of a claim and highlight potential fraudulent activities, as well as help get proper remuneration for claims rooted in deficiencies in suppliers’ components (which is particularly important as more manufacturers include components from multiple subvendors).

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