Contractual and quality aspects on warranty: Best practices for the warranty management and its maturity assessment

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a brief summary of quality and contractual aspects for the improvement of the warranty management. Together with this, the present work will show also some of the best practices followed by companies in order to manage properly those kinds of issues related to warranty, as well as some indications to assess the implementation degree of such practices in the whole organization. Basically, the global objective of the study is to present to the reader and in few words the importance of taking into account legal and quality aspects, when a company offers a technical service for the warranty assistance of any of its products, together with the maturity level that this company achieves applying some best practices currently available. Design/methodology/approach - The study starts by mentioning some antecedents related to warranty, in order to summarize a reference framework, proposed for proper warranty management, and how the information exchange should be performed among the different departments of a generic company. Then, it will be suggested how to apply this according to a strategic management which is divided in phases, taken from the product life cycle concept: Front-end, Design and Development, Production, Marketing, and Post-sale Support. These phases are included in three higher stages considered as Pre-Launch stage, Launch and Post-Launch stage, where different decisions play important roles. Afterwards, it will be shown how warranty management is viewed from the contract and legal point of view, in order to link the above mentioned topics on generic management, with those best practices currently presented in actual markets. Finally, once analysed, all those aspects related to best practices and its application on the reference framework, it is required now to quantify how a company manages the warranty assistances by a maturity assessment on warranty management. Findings - The paper observes what today's companies are doing in this field, that is, their best practices in warranty management covering the quality and contractual aspects already mentioned, in order to round off the development of a completed framework for such management. Originality/value - The paper presents a review, a framework and a practical application of the framework for the management of warranty contracts, including a maturity assessment or evaluation.