Warranty Week Industry Headlines

Thirteenth Annual Product Warranty Report: As the latest charts clearly show, American manufacturers are spending less on warranty than they used to. But is it because of better products, less costly repairs, or fewer sales? Now that the 2015 warranty expense data collection is almost complete, it's time to figure out why claims and accruals are declining.
March 24, 2016

Appliance Protection Plans: When it's all counted together, a huge amount of money is being set aside to pay for product repairs. Manufacturers finance their warranties and consumers can purchase additional protection through either service contracts or home warranties. It all adds up to about $6.77 billion spent last year on protection plans.
January 28, 2016

WCM Conference Keynotes: The technology is changing. The need for repairs is changing. Even the concept of ownership is changing. And the way people shop is changing. Two industry experts describe how they see these changes impacting warranty and service contracts.
February 26, 2015

Assurant Expert Services: While repairs are a huge part of aftermarket services, so are installations, assemblies, configuration and preventative maintenance. Assurant Solutions is putting them all under a single umbrella that it can offer to its retail clients who can in turn sell service to their end user customers.
August 30, 2012

NLA Circuit Board Repairs Offer Profitable Service Addition for Appliance Contractors
February 10, 2011

50/50 Warranties: Dealers who sell used vehicles sometimes can't afford or won't risk the cost of a limited warranty policy. So they ask customers to split the cost of repairs for the first 30 or 90 days. Some regulators say these types of warranties are unfair or misleading, but others say all that's needed is adequate disclosure.
May 13, 2010

Design for Warranty: Products can be designed so that not only can they be fixed faster, but also so they can be fixed by customers themselves. Given that labor is the major component of warranty claims, product designs that plan for customer self-repairs can cut costs.
March 11, 2010

NEW's Smart Procurement: By taking advantage of ServiceBench's connectivity with servicers and parts distributors, NEW is hoping to speed up repairs by helping servicers to find and order parts. The resulting reduction in turnaround time should make NEW's retail clients happier and its service contract customers less unhappy.
June 18, 2009

Green Warranties, Part Two: While product warranties are focused on repairs at the beginning of a product's life, anti-pollution efforts aim to reduce energy usage over the full life of a product while recycling efforts are focused on waste disposal at the end of a product's useful life.
May 21, 2008

Warranty Benchmarking Survey: Though the sample size was small, the results were significant. And this is just the initial round of APQC's planned expansion into the benchmarking of warranty repairs and other after-sales services.
October 16, 2007

Xbox Warranty Costs: For a company that's never reported a warranty expense, Microsoft sure has a problem on its hands, now that it lengthened the Xbox 360 warranty to three years and took a billion-dollar charge to finance those repairs. But outside of the warranty community, does anybody really care?
July 10, 2007

Digital Media Warranties: Digital music players and digital cameras, despite prices that sometimes surpass several thousand dollars, are never warranted for more than a year. Some manufacturers will cover labor charges for only the first 90 days, which pushes these units right to the edge of disposability, given the cost of repairs.
August 15, 2006

Business Jet Warranties: Unlike the airlines, the owners of corporate jets expect the white glove treatment from manufacturers. While they'll gladly bring their jets to an authorized service center for warranty work, they'll never try to do their own repairs. And while they expect their planes to be fixed fast, they'll almost never have their own spare parts on hand.
March 9, 2004

Warranty Services: While most of the service providers in the warranty industry focus exclusively upon the sale and administration of extended service plans, a handful of intrepid companies have outsourced product warranty claims processing for manufacturers in the consumer electronics industry, where repairs can be performed by any of tens of thousands of service centers.
August 11, 2003

Warranties in the HVAC/R Industry: As temperatures climb, so does the need for air conditioner and refrigerator repairs. But even in the cold winter months, HVAC/R vendors spent an average of 1.9% of product sales to satisfy warranty claims, according to recently filed financial statements.
June 30, 2003