Using Warranty Analytics to Improve Customer Satisfaction and Reduce Operating Costs

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

Bill Lycette and Paul JonesAgilent Technologies

4½ year time period

Ann

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ed F

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July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

WARP – Warranty Analytics & Reporting ProgramTaking the next step in driving reliability improvement

Objectives of WARP

• Replace aging applications with a leading-edge warranty analytics tool set

• Support initiatives to continuously improve reliability• Increase efficiency of our Quality workforce speed to answer!• Understand and improve customer experience with the entire

reliability life cycle• Answer complex questions by analyzing data in multiple

dimensions, e.g. account name, customer site, country, ship date• Analyses at the system, subsystem and subassembly levels;

provide for advanced statistical capability, e.g. Weibull, Mean Cumulative Function and Kaplan-Meier methods.

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

Some Examples of Required Capability

• Installed base analysis

• Fail rate by geographic region

• Understand the reliability life cycle

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

Important Complex Questions for Your Business to Answer• Does Customer X experience a higher failure rate than the worldwide average?

• Is the reliability of a product worse in Country A as compared with Country B?

• Is there a difference in reliability based on country of manufacture or ship date?

• How does the reliability of a product in the fifth year of use compare to the reliability during the first year? Any ticking time bombs?

• Which customers have products nearing the end of warranty? What products and how many?

• Account Representative or Division VP is going to visit a customer. Is there something Agilent can be proactively prepared to do when they walk on site?

Spotfire Custom Query Tool

Config blocks generated for Spotfire Pro, Webplayer, or Automation Services.

Parameterized Information Links allow several analyses to load from a common menu

Some business logic and GUI code maintained outside Spotfire.

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

Annualized Failure Rate: Overview

Interactive Toolbars customized for the analysis

Complete product history

Dynamic Annual Failure Rate Zoom, data labels, tooltips

Overlay series for comparison

R data function computes group and overall AFR

Annualized Failure Rate: Deep Dive AnalysisMultiple tabs in analysis for more insightsDrill through any data dimensions of interest

Unicode character data supportLinkable to web translation tools

Interactive Filters on any field

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

Mean Cumulative Function

Comparing:• Ship years/Design Changes• Customer vs. Overall• Product Lines/Models

Detecting:• Part wear out mechanisms• Reliability phases (burn in, random, wearout)

Predicting:• Warranty expenses• Total cost of ownership• Future reliability of similar products

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

Converting Insights to Customer Satisfaction1. Customer reports poor on time delivery performance (~50%).

2. Pull the data…

3. Internal analysis suggests only 3% late arrivals due to 4 late shipments with explanatory comments.

4. Customer realized their shipping/receiving department was delaying receipt of deliveries.

1. Customer dissatisfied with reliability of specific product

2. Pull the data…

3. 6 failures occurred on 2 of the 31 units.

4. Identified process change to avoid failure mode.

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

Automation Services

Creating snapshot chart images for use as menu into interactive analyses

Aggregating charts from multiple analyses

Batch processing to apply rules and generate alerts

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

It’s All About Efficient Speed to AnswerThe Spotfire-enabled WARP toolset enables the broader Agilent organization to focus on solving problems, not reinventing solutions.

July 2013Bill Lycette & Paul Jones

Questions?