Learning Objectives
Learn about best practices and benchmarks for improving warranty financial management, including:
- Properly accounting for warranty costs and accruals
- Benchmarking yourself with others in your industry
- Optimizing warranty accruals and revenue recognition while managing risk tolerance
Program Content
In 2005, approximately 800 corporations were required to report warranty accruals in accordance with SEC regulations. For the majority of these companies, developing accrual estimates is a time-consuming, manual process that yields inaccurate estimates of future warranty claims. These faulty estimates typically lead to over-funding the account, which leaves capital sitting around – otherwise known as “lazy capital.” On the other hand, inaccuracy can also lead to under-funded accounts that may result in a financial crisis to adjust the accounts.
Join BetterManagement.com and SAS to hear case studies that quantify the impact automation and sophisticated modeling have on the bottom line by transforming lazy capital into working capital. You’ll even hear how one company decreased its error rate from 26 percent to less than 1 percent.
Accuracy in reserves requires statistical modeling to produce product performance models for thousands of SKUs – simply not feasible without automated modeling. What would it mean for your corporation to automate this manual process to gain greater accuracy?
The panelists will discuss best practices generated from numerous case studies and industry experience.
Participant Level of Understanding
This Webcast is intended for participants with an interest in warranty financial management.
Who Should Attend?
Accounting and finance managers, and warranty executives and managers who want to understand how they can manage risk with confidence to improve accruals and put working capital to better use.
About Eric Arnum, Greg Spraker and William Eliason
Eric Arnum, Editor, Warranty Week
Eric Arnum is the editor of Warranty Week, an online publication for the warranty professional. Launched in 2002, Warranty Week focuses on the manufacturing industry's aftermarket, with analyses of warranty costs, regulatory reporting, market value, and warranty product and management trends.
Warranty Week also hosts the Warranty Chain Management Conference, an annual event that gives warranty professionals the opportunity to meet and discuss warranty-related issues and develop warranty management as a recognized discipline.
Before launching Warranty Week, Arnum edited several newsletters in the telecom industry, and performed research and consulting projects for a wide range of clients in North America, South America and Europe.
Greg Spraker, Service Intelligence Strategist, SAS
Greg Spraker is a Service Intelligence Strategist for SAS. He has more than 15 years of experience in reliability engineering and warranty management in a variety of industries, including telecommunications, aerospace, industrial controls and medical devices.
Spraker consults with corporations to help them build and optimize service intelligence centers. He is a certified reliability engineer.
William Eliason, Global Warranty and Service Cost Manager, Sun Microsystems
As Global Warranty and Service Cost Manager for Sun Microsystems, William Eliason focuses on partnering with Sun engineering to develop and measure product warranty support estimates on a global basis. This includes oversight of consolidating warranty and service contract support cost metrics, which Sun also uses for estimating and measuring costs associated with new product offerings, deal analysis, and service product margins.
