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TREAD Act

TREAD Act (Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation Act) mandates reporting of certain specific information regarding customer contact to NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). To comply virtually all customer and dealer contacts must be logged. Beginning April 1, 2003 , Manufacturers must report, production information, with the additional requirement that historical production information for the last three years be provided with the initial report. The area's that must be reported include:

Field reports
Manufacturers must report the total number of field reports they receive from the manufacturer's employees, representatives, and dealers, and from fleets, that are related to problems with certain specified components and systems that occurred in the US. In addition, they must provide copies of certain field reports received from their employees, representatives, and fleets, but are not required to provide copies of reports received from dealers.

Production
Manufacturers must report the total number of vehicles, and tires, by make, model, and model year, during the reporting period and the prior nine model years. They must separately report the numbers identified above for each model and model year, as the rule defines it.

Published documents
All manufacturers must provide copies of all documents sent or made available to more than one dealer, distributor, owner, purchaser, lessor or lessee, in the US concerning customer satisfaction campaigns, customer advisories, recalls, or other activities involving the repair or replacement of vehicles or equipment.

Deaths
Manufacturers must report certain specified information about each incident involving a death that occurred in the US that is identified in a claim against and received by the manufacturer. They must also report information about incidents involving a death that is identified in a notice received by the manufacturer alleging or proving that the death was caused by a possible defect in the manufacturer's product. Finally, they must report on each death occurring in foreign countries that is identified in a claim against the manufacturer involving the manufacturer's product, or one that is identical or substantially similar to a product that manufacturer has offered for sale in the US .

Injuries
Manufacturers must report certain specified information about each incident involving an injury that occurred in the US that is identified in a claim against and received by the manufacturer, or that is identified in a notice received by the manufacturer which alleges or proves that injury was caused by a possible defect in the manufacturer's product.

Property damage
Manufacturers must report the number of claims for property damage that occurred in the US that are related to alleged problems with certain specified components and systems, regardless of the amount of such claims.

Consumer complaints
Manufacturers must report the number of consumer complaints they receive that are related to problems with certain specified components and systems that occurred in the US.

Warranty claims information
Manufacturers must report the number of warranty claims, including extended warranty and good will, they receive that are related to problems with certain systems that occurred in the US.

Going Beyond the TREAD Act with Early Warning Data

Manufacturers embark upon five or six standard warranty initiatives, in a certain order, to cut costs dramatically and build customer loyalty and brand reputation over a period of 1 to 3 years. These initiatives follow a certain order, because some of them are dependent upon others. As a result of the Early Warning data provided by Entigo Warranty, companies are able to improve quality, customer satisfaction and reduce warranty costs.

Entigo Warranty automates warranty claims processing on an updated system that has the open technology and flexibility to kick off the other initiatives.

Entigo Warranty improves and further automates the claims processing through use of the rules engine.

Entigo Warranty helps companies focus on supplier recovery and/or returns management/RMAs to squeeze out inefficiencies and omissions.

Entigo Warranty simplifies and streamlines the ability for companies to push sales of extended warranties as a high-margin revenue generator.

Finally, the fact that good breakdown, cause and repair information is available from Entigo Warranty leads to an initiative to feed this information into a reporting and analysis system. The system usually combines information from warranty, design, production, and quality systems. This initiative holds the potential for greatest long term savings as your company uncovers malfunctions and breakdowns and changes design and production to eliminate them.

Entigo Warranty and the TREAD Act
Entigo Warranty is a product that focuses on warranty claims processing and related activities - such as returns, RMAs, and recovery of claim money across dealerships, service centers, distributors, OEMs, and multiple tiers of suppliers - as claims progress through the warranty chain.

The scope of the TREAD Act goes beyond warranty claims, because in addition to claim information it requires collection of field reports, consumer complaints, property damage, injuries and fatalities. Reporting of these activities generally falls well outside the scope of a company's warranty activities. The information even passes through corporate legal departments and other functions that are completely separate from warranty operations.

Since Entigo Warranty is part of a TREAD Act solution but does not provide the complete answer, Entigo offers Syncata's solution specifically designed for the TREAD Act.

How Entigo Warranty Supports the TREAD Act Efforts
Entigo Warranty helps companies in their efforts to comply with the TREAD Act by providing detailed, granular warranty claim information that can easily be rolled up for inclusion in the TREAD Act reporting requirements. The product facilitates this process in two ways:

Entigo Warranty provides granular information that allows an automotive manufacturer to break out claim information by date, model, component parts both individually and in relation to one another, serial number, production batch (therefore manufacturing plant), and geography. With this information, manufacturers can spot trends in claims related to any of these factors (and more) much sooner, and can therefore comply with the TREAD Act's early warning requirements.
Entigo Warranty houses claim data in a relational database on industry standard enterprise servers, which makes information much more accessible for routine TREAD Act reporting. Contrast this to the many legacy claims processing systems that run on mainframes where the development of a single new report involves months of waiting.

As part of the effort to comply with the TREAD Act, an initiative which most manufacturers approach as an added cost of doing business, the implementation of Entigo Warranty in the claims processing area can result in an overall TREAD Act project that saves the company money due to the resulting warranty cost savings.

TREAD Act: Only the First Act
In their rush to comply with NHTSA deadlines, it is easy for automotive manufacturers and suppliers to miss the fact that the reporting requirements are merely the beginning of TREAD Act activities. The initial reports delivered to regulatory authorities will inevitably result in requests for clarification and more detailed data to verify accuracy and investigate spikes in equipment failures.

It is in this context that Entigo Warranty proves its true worth to a company through immediate capture of detailed claim data and an architecture that makes that data available across the enterprise via industry standard reporting tools. Automotive manufacturers will need to query and analyze the detailed warranty data in order to respond to NHTSA requests.

Through a partnership between Entigo and Syncata, the Syncata TREAD Reporting solution makes use of Entigo Warranty's architecture to readily access data captured during claims processing to produce reports and metrics covering warranty trends, unexpected events and forecasts.