The only recent book to cover "Stage 3" warranty management, linking strategic and operational aspects for manufactured products. Shows how to make warranty management an effective tool for enhancing customer satisfaction. Uses minimal mathematics and presents accounting and legal aspects of warranty management in an easily understandable style. Written by two of the world’s leading experts in warranty management.

Quality, Warranty and Preventive Maintenance examines the impact of product quality on warranty and maintenance costs and strategies, from the perspectives of both manufacturers and users. In addition, the theories of warranty and preventive maintenance are introduced and discussed. Common wisdom supports the notion that better product quality means lower warranty costs for the manufacturer, and lower maintenance costs for the users of a manufactured product. This proposition is examined in some detail on the basis of failure time models. The authors investigate what exactly better quality means in warranty and maintenance management, and how it impacts warranty policies and costs for the manufacturer, and replacement and maintenance strategies and costs for the users. In measuring quality improvement, the main concepts and tools used are those of stochastic ordering and mixture models. The theoretical base of the work is a time-varying failure-rectification process. This process includes, as special cases, replacement, minimal repair, and imperfect repair, as alternative rectification modes that may be available to the manufacturer or the user in warranty-servicing or maintaining a product. In addition to serving as a unifying base for the entire monograph, the use of this process enables one to investigate jointly optimal repair-effort/warranty-policy and repair-effort/maintenance-strategy configurations for repairable units. This book should be of interest to researchers in industry and academia, and to quality, warranty and maintenance professionals, specialists, and managers with a technical background. It is suitable as a textbook to support graduate-level seminar courses in OR/MS, IE and business administration curricula.

This volume presents concepts, policies and cost models for various long-term warranty and maintenance contracts. It offers several numerical examples for estimating costs to both the manufacturer and consumer. Long-term warranties and maintenance contracts are becoming increasingly popular, as these types of aftersales services provide assurance to consumers that they can enjoy long, reliable service, and protect them from defects and the potentially high costs of repairs. Studying long-term warranty and service contracts is important to manufacturers and consumers alike, as offering long-term warranty and maintenance contracts produce additional costs for manufacturers / service providers over the product’s service life. These costs must be factored into the price, or the manufacturer / dealer will incur losses instead of making a profit. On the other hand, the buyer / consumer needs to weigh the cost of maintaining it over its service life and to decide whether or not these policies are worth purchasing. There are a number of complexities involved in developing failure and cost models for these policies due to uncertainties concerning the service life, usage pattern, maintenance work and long-term costs of rectifications. Mathematical models for predicting failures and expected costs for various one-dimensional long-term warranty policies are developed at the system level and analyzed by taking into account the uncertainties in connection with longer coverage periods and the rectification costs over the warranty period. Failures and costs are modeled using stochastic techniques and illustrated by means of numerical examples for estimating costs to the manufacturer and consumer. Various rectification policies are proposed and analyzed. The models developed here can be used to aid in managerial decisions on purchasing products with long-term warranty policies and maintenance contracts or outsourcing maintenance.