On the Risks and Costs Methodologies Applied for the Improvement of the Warranty Management

This paper deals with the problem of efficiency in warranty management programs, where efficiency is understood as provisioning an effective product warranty service to the lowest cost. For that purpose, this paper first defines the concept of warranty and its interaction with other disciplines. It introduces all the necessary stages that should be included within a framework for warranty management. This brief introduction will help the reader to place the work presented in this paper within a context of tools and methods already developed in the literature for similar areas management. Later on, an analysis on risk and cost is presented applying these methodologies to the development of a warranty program. We show how generic tools developed for project management can now be adapted, in a very useful way, to organize and control the technical assistances to customers during the warranty period. Finally, conclusions of the work are presented, where the main concepts of the paper are summarized and further potential research is suggested.