Honda

Business Challenge

Honda works closely with its dealerships across the country to perform warrantied repair work on its vehicles. When warranty submissions from dealerships are inaccurate or incomplete, it leads to significant costs for the company. To increase dealership warranty compliance, Honda uses analytics to flag potential problem submissions.

Analytics Solution

Honda’s advanced analytics team empowers dealers to understand the appropriate warranty processes by providing them with useful information in an online report. To support a goal of reducing inappropriate warranty costs, the team examines information about repairs, parts, customers and other details. The company uses SAS Analytics to create a proprietary process, surfacing suspicious warranty claims for scrutiny on a daily basis to ensure dealers are compliant with existing guidelines. Once a manual, tedious and time-intensive effort, the now visual approach yields cost reduction opportunities.

Impact

Previously, it took a staff member one week each month to aggregate and report warranty data within Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Honda now automatically populates those reports on an easily accessible online dashboard, recovering a week of manpower to allocate toward other projects. Leveraging analytics, Honda’s advanced analytics group provided the company’s claims group and field personnel the ability to identify claims that were incomplete, inaccurate or noncompliant more quickly and accurately.

Examiners once spent more than three minutes to identify a potentially noncompliant claim, finding a truly noncompliant claim only 35% of the time. They now spend less than one minute to identify a suspicious claim and are finding a noncompliant claim 76% of the time. Honda also reduced labor costs for 52% of its available labor codes through a more complete analysis of warranty claims.