CARY, NC and VIENNA, VA, March 12, 2002 – SAS Institute, the market leader in business intelligence and data warehousing, and Entigo™ Corporation, the pioneer and industry leader in B2B sell and service-side eBusiness solutions, today announced plans to deliver the first end-to-end Collaborative Warranty System (CWS) for SAP. The warranty claims management and analysis product offering from SAS and Entigo will enable manufacturers using SAP AG to streamline warranty management processes, improve warranty cost forecasting, reduce financial exposure and dealer claim fraud, recover monies owed due to supplier-failed components, improve problem identification and resolution cycle time, and improve product quality and customer satisfaction.
"The automotive industry takes an average of 30 days to receive and administer a warranty claim," said Kevin Prouty, research director at AMR Research, in a Report on Manufacturing published November 2000. "In addition, taking the total claims and feeding the information back to manufacturing and design can take anywhere from 60 days to 2 years... For example, one automotive company recently recalled a vehicle because of a potential leak in the gas tank. It took two years for someone to put together all of the warranty, manufacturing, and design data to prove the vehicle may have a problem. In that two-year span, over 500,000 vehicles were produced with the potential problem."
The CWS offering from SAS and Entigo helps users to fully leverage their SAP AG investment and realize a visible return on investment by turning their data into useful information. The warranty offering for SAP will provide tighter integration to SAP's customer relationship management, financials, and supply chain management applications. Customers using SAP for field- and customer-service related activities will be able to integrate the warranty registration, claims, recovery, and causal-part data collected within Entigo Warranty with Six Sigma, customer survey, quality and other related service data.
Using SAS Warranty Analysis to analyze and report on this data, customers can obtain a holistic view of their after-sales service operations. Armed with this information, manufacturers will be able to reduce the time it takes to identify trends, product failures and quality issues, and then take proactive steps to quickly resolve problems and improve product quality and reliability.
Included in SAS® Warranty Analysis is an Enterprise Data Model Explorer for SAP's R/3 table navigation and a remote function call server that provides data transfer capabilities between SAP and the SAS System. Entigo Warranty for SAP will include a pre-packaged transactional adaptor for SAP that provides the ability to exchange transactional and financial data between Entigo Warranty and the SAP R/3 system.
The product offering will be previewed during a multi-city executive seminar series. The first seminar will feature Kevin Prouty, Director of Automotive Strategies with AMR Research, as keynote speaker and will be held March 28 at the Westin Hotel Southfield in Detroit, MI. To register for this event, go to www.entigo.com/breakfast.
Entigo Warranty
Entigo Warranty, the industry's first warranty management application for B2B Web-based claims management, streamlines the registering, processing, and recovery of product warranty programs and claims. Entigo Warranty automates the interaction between manufacturers, channel members, component suppliers, and end users for the registration and claims processing of warranty programs, improving end user and sales channel satisfaction while saving manufacturers millions of dollars. Entigo Warranty creates significant returns within large organizations by reducing the costs of administering warranty programs, decreasing the time to resolve and pay claims, and providing manufacturers access to claims information to proactively address product quality issues. It also enables them to reclaim monies owed by suppliers due to the failure of faulty component parts.
SAS Warranty Analysis
The SAS Warranty Analysis Solution integrates warranty data with key customer, vehicle, production, and geographic information in a way that enables organizations to achieve a level of knowledge that translates into significant value. This component is designed specifically for warranty reporting, analysis, and collaboration. It includes features such as an industry-specific warranty data model, data access and transformation methods, standard reports, ad hoc query and reporting, and analytic capabilities. Through a Web-based interface, users can examine data, drill down on details, and distribute the results using its publish and subscribe feature or using the traditional print, mail/email process. Warranty Analysis enables companies to overcome the data availability barrier and allows decision-makers to gain a better understanding of their warranty issues and the actions required to improve performance.
About Entigo
Entigo is the pioneer and industry leader in real eBusiness solutions making it faster, easier and more cost-effective for manufacturers to market, sell and service their products through channel partners to customers on the Web. Entigo Reality, the most comprehensive suite of B2B sell and service-side eBusiness products, delivers real ROI through reduced costs, increased sales, greater customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Entigo Reality features a modular set of applications enabling manufacturers to easily adapt to fast-changing market needs and business processes in real time. Entigo customers and partners include Honeywell, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Carrier Corporation, BEA, and IBM.
About SAS
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 38,000 sites – including 99 of the top 100 businesses on the Fortune 500 – to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know™. Visit SAS at www.sas.com.
Copyright © 2002 Entigo Corporation
Contact:
Elizabeth Murray
Entigo Corporation
610.524.8204
info.request@entigo.com
Wally Maczka or Mike Nemece
SAS Institute Inc.
919.531.5350
Wally.Maczka@sas.com
www.sas.com/newsroom
Entigo and Entigo Warranty are trademarks of Entigo Corporation. All other trademarks contained herein are property of their respective owners.
