A review on coarse warranty data and analysis

Warranty data contain useful information about product quality and reliability, but they are usually coarse data because they may be aggregated, delayed, censored, missing or vague. They might, however, be the only forms of warranty data a manufacturer has, analysing such data are therefore needed and can also be of benefit to manufacturers in identifying early warnings of abnormalities in their products, providing useful information about failure modes to aid design modification, estimating product reliability for deciding on warranty policy, and forecasting future warranty claims needed for preparing warranty reserves plans. In last two decades, considerable research has been conducted in analysing coarse warranty data (CWD) from several different perspectives. This paper categorises different types of CWD and reviews techniques to analyse such data. It concludes with research needs in CWD. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.