Warranty Data Analysis: A Review

Warranty claims and supplementary data contain useful information about product quality and reliability. Analysing such data can therefore 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 fiscal plans. In the last two decades, considerable research has been conducted in warranty data analysis (WDA) from several different perspectives. This article attempts to summarise and review the research and developments in WDA with emphasis on models, methods and applications. It concludes with a brief discussion on current practices and possible future trends in WDA

Insurance contracts after the Insurance Act 2015

Discusses the provisions of the Insurance Act 2015 ss.10 and 11 on the consequences of an insured being in breach of a warranty or policy term respectively. Examines the background to the Act, including the perceived need to remedy the absence of a proportionality requirement when insurers seek to avoid a policy for breach of its conditions. Considers how the provisions differ from the proposals put forward by the Law Commission

Warranty return policies for products with unknown claim causes and their optimisation

In practical warranty services management, faults may not always be found in claimed items by warranty service agents, which is the well-known no-fault found phenomenon (for example, caused by a loose connection between parts, or simply human error). This phenomenon can contribute more than 40% of reported service faults in electronic products and it can be due to faults of manufacturers or product users. Little research, however, considers this phenomenon in warranty management since faults are normally assumed to be found in the claimed items. On the basis of different levels of testing, this paper proposes three warranty return policies, which decide whether new items should be sent to warranty claimants or not. It then derives and compares the expected costs of the policies, and obtains the optimal warranty periods under supply chain environments. The paper illustrates the results with artificially generated data

Second-Hand Markets and Collusion byManufacturers of Semidurable Goods

The focus of the present work is to study the impact of the second-hand market the collusivebehavior. I analyze firms' preferences for having an active second-hand market and whetherpolicies (i.e. leasing policy, buy-back policy and warranty policy) that affect the functioningof the second-hand market strengthen collusion. I show how collective incentives to adoptstrategies that strengthen collusion often differ from monopoly incentives to achieve higherprofits.Bertrand competition, buy-back policies, collusion, leasing, semi-durability,second-hand market, warranty.

The US Transit Bus Manufacturing Industry

Manufacturing buses for the US transit market has been a challenging business over the last several decades. It is a small market with volatile demand. Many manufacturers have gone bankrupt, left the market, or been acquired by competitors. Manufacturers of transit buses in the US must comply with a wide range of operational and design regulations. The most salient policy areas include regulating emissions, disabled access, procurement, alternative fuels, the Altoona Test, pooled purchases and piggybacking, spare ratios, workforce training, minimum useful life, Buy America, and research & development (R&D). The purpose of this report is to provide policy makers with an update on the state of the industry, an analysis of how government policies are impacting the industry, and suggestions for policies that can help the industry move forward and thrive to best serve the transit-riding public