VIENNA, VA and CARY, NC, November 12, 2001 – Entigo™ Corporation, the pioneer and industry leader in B2B sell and service-side eBusiness solutions, and SAS Institute, the market leader in business intelligence and data warehousing, today announced an agreement to deliver the market's first end-to-end warranty solution. The solution will help manufacturers streamline warranty management processes, improve the forecasting of warranty costs, reduce financial exposure and dealer claim fraud, recover monies due to supplier-failed components, improve problem identification and resolution cycle time, and improve product quality and customer satisfaction. Entigo today also announced its appointment as a SAS Global Alliance Partner.
Under the terms of the worldwide agreement, the companies will integrate and jointly market and sell the Entigo Warranty™ and the SAS® Warranty Analysis products initially in North America. The joint Entigo and SAS offering, available immediately, targets sectors in the manufacturing industry, including automotive and heavy-duty vehicle OEMs and suppliers, aircraft manufacturers, industrial/commercial electronic goods and components, and instruments with high-service/high-cost components. Entigo and SAS also agree to jointly develop future product offerings.
"Companies collect unimaginable amounts of data on product and customers, but they often fail to convert the data to information that would allow timely and proactive involvement of manufacturing, engineering, and customer service in handling potential warranty problems," explains Kevin Prouty, research director at AMR Research, in a Report on Manufacturing published November 2000. "Most automotive manufacturers view each warranty claim as an isolated administrative item, and analysis is usually relegated to very high-level aggregation for trending purposes. Because of the aggregation, the response time takes months or years. Only when a liability issue presents itself does the organization spring into action, having people manually data-mine warranty, product, and manufacturing data for specific patterns. The cost of warranty claims to the Automotive industry could be lowered to less than $250 per vehicle just by integrating all of the data sources and being proactive in analyzing the data."
"The North American automotive industry spends $8.5 billion dollars on warranty each year," said Thomas Roehm, SAS automotive practice manager. "By reducing the complexity of warranty management and providing the ability to proactively analyze warranty and product information, companies can save a significant amount of money. The manufacturing marketplace currently lacks an end-to-end warranty solution. Companies that pursue a comprehensive warranty strategy can expect to see a ROI typically in less than 12 months and many soft benefits such as improved brand image and customer satisfaction."
"If manufacturers are to remain competitive they must get their warranty management house in order," said Mark Demers, vice president of marketing and business development at Entigo. "The inability to recover warranty costs from suppliers, the overpayment of warranty claims, payment of faulty claims, long problem-identification and root-cause cycle times, and the inability to accurately forecast warranty costs is costing manufacturers millions of dollars annually. By combining the best-in-class business analytics and reporting from SAS with the pioneering Entigo Warranty application, we can provide manufacturers with a solution to outdated warranty claims management, reporting, and analysis."
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. Developed in conjunction with large manufacturing partners, 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. Surpassing other vendors' ability to simply submit forms-based electronic registrations, Entigo Warranty allows channel partners to view all claims associated with user groups, validate and classify claims against product registration information and warranty programs, view standard repair time, and log actual labor. 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 while at the same time enabling them to reclaim monies owed to them by suppliers due to the failure of faulty supplied 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 allows 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. Powered by the preferred industry standard eCommerce platform, 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 solutions are used by many of the world's leading manufacturers across industries as diverse as transportation, industrial products and household durables. Entigo customers and partners include Honeywell, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Carrier Corporation, BEA, and IBM. Entigo has offices throughout the United States.
About SAS
SAS provides software and services that enable customers to transform data from all areas of their business into intelligence. SAS solutions help organizations make better, more informed decisions and maximize customer, supplier, and organizational relationships. Solutions from SAS, the world's largest privately held software company, are used at more than 37,000 business, government and university sites around the world. Customers include 98 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune 500 and 90 percent of Fortune 500 overall. For 25 years, SAS has been giving our customers The Power to Know™. For more information, visit www.sas.com.
Copyright © 2002 Entigo Corporation
Contact:
Elizabeth Murray
Entigo Corporation
610.524.8204
info.request@entigo.com
Faye Merrideth
SAS Institute, Inc.
919.531.4261
faye.merrideth@sas
Entigo and Entigo Warranty are trademarks of Entigo Corporation. All other trademarks contained herein are property of their respective owners.
