Warranty data and effective warranty management

Warranty serves a dual role: (i) signalling product reliability; (ii) providing assurance. Offering warranty results in additional costs to the manufacturer and this cost depends on product reliability. Effective warranty management requires making proper warranty and reliability decisions during the design stage of new product development and revising the decisions based on warranty data. This paper deals with this topic and looks at several relevant issues. It also discusses some of the issues and challenges that need to be addressed in the future.