ACADEMIA

HP and PolyVista today announced that they have completed the implementation of a warranty chain management solution for Trane, a leading global provider of indoor comfort systems and comprehensive facility solutions for commercial, institutional and residential buildings. The solution, which was up and running in eight weeks, helps Trane quickly identify product quality and warranty-related issues through automated early detection and root cause analysis. After correcting any current issue detected by the solution, manufacturing teams at Trane can pass the information on to the design or engineering teams to help avoid problems in future products, as well as to vendors and suppliers to help improve long-term product reliability. Through this process, the solution offers reduced warranty costs, improved product development, sourcing and manufacturing processes, and better customer satisfaction. “HP and PolyVista’s warranty and quality analytics solution worked immediately, allowing us to effectively mine our warranty and production data,” said Jerry Brinks, senior quality engineer and Six Sigma Black Belt, Trane. “This helps us to identify potential product defects and warranty management challenges, trends and anomalies for faster identification and resolution of product quality and warranty-related problems before we start hearing about it from anywhere else.” The PolyVista and HP solution frees Trane’s business users from dependence on IT or statisticians to analyze warranty and quality data – the solution provides both technical and non-technical Trane employees with a means to analyze disparate data sources using high-end analytics and text mining. “With PolyVista, HP is enabling Trane’s business users to discover new and valuable business insights hidden in their data to transform the customer warranty and quality management processes from reactive to proactive,” said Brian Walker, director, Americas Automotive Industries, HP. Throughout Trane’s solution investigation and vendor selection process, HP and PolyVista worked to provide the company’s key business users with an analytic environment that automatically uncovered anomalies, correlations and relationships hidden in their data. “It is the ability to uncover unknown issues and problems that is critical to reducing production costs and warranty spend and delivering high-quality products to customers,” said Bob Potts, vice president of sales, PolyVista. “Our experience in working with HP consulting and helping other manufacturers enabled us to deliver significant value to Trane very quickly.”