Tavant Hosts Salesforce Lightning Developer Meet
Bangalore, India, March 14, 2015– Tavant, a leading global provider of specialized software solutions, announced today, that over 300 Salesforce developers rallied to get hands-on with Salesforce Lightning tools in the ‘Lightning Developer Meet’ hosted at Tavant’s Bangalore office on Saturday, March 14. Tavant’s developers created an exclusive registration app to automate the registration process. The Meet was part of the ‘Lightning Developer Week’ tour – organized by Salesforce, to introduce developers to Salesforce1 Lightning – a platform that enables build apps, fast and easy. The Meet included a packed agenda of Salesforce1 Lightning overview, demo, and tutorials. It also provided an opportunity for networking and socializing. Tavant’s involvement in the Lightning Developer Week is a reiteration of its focus on developing cutting-edge solutions on Salesforce platform. In mid-2014, the company launched ‘Tavant Warranty On-Demand’ on Salesforce1 Platform. The product brought together Force.com’s proven technology with Tavant’s domain and industry expertise in the aftermarket space. About Salesforce Lightning Salesforce Lightning provides a component framework and a new set of tools for developers and users to build apps, integrate data, and automate business processes faster. It enables seamless access to data from external sources, side-by-side with Salesforce data.
Tavant Co-Sponsors Warranty Chain Management Conference 2015
Santa Clara, Calif., March 2, 2015: Tavant, a leading global provider of specialized software solutions & services, announced that it is co-sponsoring the Warranty Chain Management Conference (WCM) in Miami, Florida, from March 10 to March 12, 2015. Tavant will co-present two key papers at the conference on March 11: 1. ‘Self-Diagnostics’ by Rohit Lohan from Tavant Technologies along with James Dooty from NACCO Material Handling Group 2. ‘A Warranty System Upgrade for a Robust Solution’ by Moshe Devarapalli from Tavant Technologies along with Steve Chong from Ingersoll Rand These presentations, in line with Tavant’s commitment to share warranty management best practices, address the rapidly growing demand for effective warranty management. Tavant will be showcasing its flexible enterprise Warranty Management System – Tavant Warranty along with Fraud Analytics Solution, and Tavant Warranty On-Demand – its cloud based offering on Force.com platform. Tavant Warranty is a web-based, full-lifecycle warranty solution that brings together OEMs, suppliers and service channel partners in a real-time environment. The solution has proven benefits enabling reduction in warranty spends, elimination of fraudulent claims, reduction in claim processing time, increase in supplier recovery and the capability to make informed decisions based on dynamic warranty intelligence reports. “WCM provides a great opportunity for warranty professionals to learn more about improving customer satisfaction and reducing warranty expense through better warranty management,” said Vibhor Mishra, Director Marketing, Tavant Technologies. “We will presenting key success stories along with our customers at our booth. Delegates can also see a demo of our new on demand version of the solution.” Meet our experts at Booth #8, Hilton Miami Downtown or call us on 415-692-0346 to schedule a meeting.
Live Webinar by Bill Pollock on “Leveraging Effective Warranty Management into Improved Customer Satisfaction and Profitability in 2015”
Santa Clara, Calif., January 29, 2015 – Tavant Technologies, a leading provider of specialized software solutions, today announced that Bill Pollock, President & Principal Consulting Analyst, Strategies for Growth℠ along with Rohit Lohan, Product Manager, Tavant Technologies will host a live, complimentary webinar titled “Leveraging Effective Warranty Management into Improved Customer Satisfaction and Profitability in 2015” on Tuesday, February 11th from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EST. The webinar will offer learnings based on insights derived from the data gathered from more than 225 respondents who took part in SFG℠’s 2014 benchmark survey. “Research like this makes for invaluable assets that are foundational to organizational best practices with regard to warranty chain management,” explains Bill. “In this webinar we will share findings from our Warranty Chain Management Benchmark Survey that identifies the three key drivers pushing Services Organizations to aspire to attain higher levels of performance.” Moderated by Rohit Lohan, Product Manager, Tavant Technologies, the webinar will present fresh insights on the current state of the Warranty Chain Management industry. Thought provoking insights include how more than three-quarters of respondents believe effective warranty chain management to be critical to their organization’s bottom line and as many as one-third are still using manual processes – or have no formal warranty management process at all. The webcast will help companies to learn: What organizations are doing to attain Best Practices status with respect to Warranty Chain Management? What leading Warranty Services Organizations are doing to attain the highest levels of Customer Satisfaction and Service Profitability What is driving the Warranty Services market to aspire to higher levels of performance, and what challenges they are likely to be facing How to emulate the strategic and tactical actions presently being taken and/or planned by the leading Warranty Services organizations For more information and to register for the webinar, visit info.tavant.com/Warranty_Webinar.html. The event will also be recorded and available for on-demand viewing afterwards at tavant.com. About Bill Pollock, President & Chief Research Officer, Strategies for GrowthSM Bill Pollock is President & Principal Consulting Analyst at Strategies For GrowthSM, the independent research analyst and consulting firm he founded in 1992. Previously, Bill served as President & Chief Research Officer (CRO) at The Service Council (2011 – 2013); Vice President, Principal Analyst, heading up Aberdeen Group’s Service Management Practice (2008 – 2010); and Managing Analyst, Services Industry at Gartner (1995 – 2001). He has had more than 250 articles published in leading services trade journals and is a frequent presenter at services conferences and trade shows. Bill’s blog is accessible @PollockOnService and via Twitter @SFGOnService. About Rohit Lohan, Product Manager and Solution Architect, Tavant Technologies, Inc Rohit has over ten years experience in enterprise application development. He is responsible for managing ‘Tavant Warranty’ as well as solution design and development for Tavant customers in the manufacturing domain. Rohit has been involved in the implementation of global warranty systems for OEMs like Doosan, Ingersoll Rand, Federal Signal, NMHG, Owens Corning and Sullair Corporation. He has extensive experience in designing software, applications that involve complicated workflow design, usage of rules engines to automate processes, complex system integrations, and mobile solutions. About Strategies For Growth℠ Strategies For GrowthSM (SFGSM) is an independent research analyst and advisory consulting firm that supports service organizations with a full range of strategic, marketing and business planning consulting; customer, market and supply chain partner surveys; customer satisfaction measurement & tracking programs; services marketing & promotional support; custom market research reports, Webinars, published articles and white papers; Business Process Evaluation/ Reengineering (BPE/R); and general services consulting. The original SFGSM website is now archived, but still accessible at www.s4growth.com. About Tavant Technologies Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Tavant Technologies is a specialized software solutions & services provider that leverages its expertise to provide impactful results to its customers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Having leveraged its unrivaled capabilities and domain insights to create game changing results for leading businesses across chosen industry micro-verticals, Tavant Technologies is known for long-lasting customer relationships, engineering excellence and passionate employees. Founded in 2000, the Company employs over 1,000 people and has been recognized as one of the Top 25 Best Companies to Work For.
Understanding the Relationship between Warranties and Customer Satisfaction
Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), equipped with the latest and best product knowledge, help in enhancing customer value and product quality. Aberdeen Group, a well-recognized business-intelligence research organization, presented a study recently. It said one of the top priorities for organizations is to improve customer satisfaction, after which comes the objective of managing costs, improving product quality and increasing revenue. But how can manufacturers be equipped with the knowledge to meet these objectives? A warranty management approach can be the solution for these OEMs. If a warranty or service contract solution can generate a product record history, it becomes easy to track the product history throughout its service life-cycle. With this information, manufacturers can gain valuable insight into the product life-cycle, which in turn provides insight for service improvements. That is why manufacturers, nowadays, are looking at warranty solutions with a strategic perspective. To achieve these objectives, manufacturers need to upgrade their existing and isolated legacy systems to integrated warranty systems, which can use advanced analytics services to churn warranty data into meaningful information. Such information helps the OEM to improve its service offerings to the customers. With real-time analytics in place, manufacturers can gain substantial productivity, increase operational efficiency, and retain customer value. The Challenge A large automobile manufacturer was facing challenges with its equipment warranty services and parts logistics system. The customers were not satisfied with the quality of equipment and hence, there were frequent customer complaints. Additionally, the response time to service requests was high compared to competitors. The organization was unable to achieve the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for equipment warranty and service parts. The biggest blow was that both, internal and external customers were complaining about the process lapse. Some of them were turning to competitors. The Solution With immediate effect, the OEM incorporated a warranty system for the client. Streamlining of processes and communication channels ensured that the equipment warranty KPIs were met. Furthermore, the analytics system traced products throughout their life-cycles and provided key insights to assess supplier performance throughout the supply chain. Moreover, it helped the OEM capture the service time taken by each of the servicing dealers, thereby keeping a check on the service turnaround time. It generated an effective internal process and helped immensely in managing and engaging internal and external customers. The Benefits Customer management & engagement Comprehensive reporting & analytics Reduced costs & customer complaints Process enhancement Proactive response to customers Development of contingency plans Improved efficiency of onsite service requirements Lesser turnaround time Increased brand credibility
Warranty Management – A Strategic Business Advantage
While warranty solutions began as a way to attract customers, their scope and application have seen radical changes over the years and organizations now realize that warranty management is a source of competitive business advantage. It offers a multitude of benefits like faster claims processing, decreased fraudulent claims, better operations management, and increased bottom-line results leading to improved satisfaction of customers and service providers. However, many fail to understand that effective functioning of warranty is hampered by a silos-based approach. Most organizations adapt the silos approach for warranty without giving it the focus it deserves. The fragmented approach to warranty leads to dissatisfied service providers and customers, greater turnaround time, high operating costs (which otherwise could have been avoided). A detailed analysis of the holistic approach can easily reveal the strategic impact it bears on each of the value chain functions, such as manufacturing, quality, sales, service, and finance. When the warranty-management process is integrated with all the key business functions, it can turn around the revenue chart of the business and multiply profitability. A holistic approach to warranty has various benefits: Improved customer satisfaction – Integrated information ensures greater connectivity, timely information and history recall for customers during product lapses. It, therefore, helps to increase commitment and boosts brand perception and organizational credibility. Faster claims processing – A closed-loop approach helps in streamlining the claims process and reduces operational discrepancies. It assists in tracking warranties across the product lifecycle and helps in optimizing product pricing while minimizing warranty costs. Decreased fraudulent claims – Processes and policies can be integrated into business logic. Streamlined processes lead to better visibility of warranty information. Integration minimizes warranty costs while enhancing the early error-detection process, thus widening the scope of improving product quality, well in time. Decreased operational cost & increased bottom line – An integrated warranty package minimizes process errors that rob organizations of strategic business focus. Product lapse trends can be closely examined for proactive measures to ensure quality and process control. An efficient warranty management solution fosters collaborative solutions, enhances product quality and customer satisfaction, addresses quality concerns, and improves partner relationships, thereby increasing operational efficiency and bottom-line results. The Client A global organization that specializes in providing diversified services to domains like home comfort, transportation & preservation of food & perishables, and securing homes & commercial properties. The Challenge The organization comprised multiple business units, each of which had diverse business requirements and ran on multiple legacy systems. Due to the market’s demand, the organization accepted additional responsibilities of spreading its services to Europe, North America, Asia, and Lagos. It faced a series of challenges in keeping up with requirements, as it lacked an inventory management system, coupled with ad-hoc retrieval systems, resulting in lack of transparency. All this led to inefficient realization of ROI. The organization was in need of a robust and comprehensive central solution to standardize the warranty management process. The Solution Massive data from all the business centers was integrated into a centralized platform. The analytics solution ensured timely projections across the value chain functions and helped in faster claims processing. It reflected early warnings of failures and identification of root causes to minimize product failures that were impacting the entire product lifecycle. The closed-loop solution transformed performance data into strategic intelligence, directly enhancing operational efficiency, decision making, customer satisfaction, reporting, and communication capabilities to identify and detect issues early. It also minimized warranty costs and enhanced business profitability. The Benefits Increased customer satisfaction & retention Better communication and collaboration Reduced warranty costs & claims processing errors Lesser turnaround time for settlement of warranty claims Greater process and operational efficiency Therefore it is crucial for organizations to ward off the one-dimensional perspective and move towards a holistic approach to warranty solutions. The integrated approach leads to a 360-degree perspective of information, efficient claims processing, better analytics, and reduced manual intervention. It also helps in achieving optimal business results and accelerated warranty management. It enables organizations to run their business functions with strategic alignment and purpose that can streamline their processes, enhance customer satisfaction, brand perception, and maximize scalability.
How to Manage Warranty Costs
Minimizing warranty costs has always been one of the most pressing concerns for organizations. While minimizing the warranty spend helps, it is also important to make an objective estimation of the costs involved. Due to the lack of information about every single step involved in the business process and the associated costs, a principle barrier becomes evident in charting the right budget. Cost mismanagement in warranty can rise from ad-hoc estimation techniques and planning for warranty reserves. The elements impacting warranty costs go beyond product repair and overflow into other areas. To estimate such hidden costs accurately, without some kind of integrated business logic, is extremely complex. The need of the hour is quantifiable strategies and techniques that can optimize the effectiveness of the warranty process. Time and again, warranty analytics have proved to show remarkable results by integrating data that helps to improve product and process performance. That helps not just in managing costs, but optimizing overall business profitability as well. Integrated technology can reflect warranty costs and assist in better operational and strategic business execution. That aids in formulating streamlined warranty management processes, building brand images, reducing operational costs, improving product quality and optimizing organizational efficiency. Business Case The Client One of the world’s fastest-growing automakers. The Challenge The existing warranty management system lacked a comprehensive analytics system that could integrate data across business functions. The organization faced a substantial revenue loss, maximizing ROI was a challenge, and organizational credibility was at stake. The team handled issues on the basis of client demands while using traditional legacy systems. The Solution With an intention to mitigate warranty costs, the organization integrated warranty data across all the business units into a single process with common business rules. The analytics solution helped reduce costs drastically and provided the organization with quantifiable data that highlighted areas profitable to the business, and the pain points that required immediate process upgrading. The outcome of the analytics system was a whopping cost reduction of close to 40% across all regions. Additional benefits included: Customer satisfaction Greater process transparency Scalable solutions Standardization of systems Quantification of results
Tavant Delivers Tavant Warranty On-Demand on the Salesforce1 Platform, Empowering Companies to Connect with Customers in a Whole New Way
SANTA CLARA, Calif. & BANGALORE, India, June 26, 2014 — Tavant, today announced Tavant Warranty On-Demand is now available on the Salesforce1 Customer Platform, the new social, mobile and cloud customer platform built to transform sales, service and marketing apps. Tavant Warranty On-Demand accelerates how companies can connect with customers in a whole new way by letting them manage complete warranty lifecycle and reduce warranty costs and reserves, increase supplier recovery, and enhance forecasting accuracy. Comment on the News “Tavant Warranty On-Demand comes as part of our on-going pursuit for product innovation, focused use of best-in-class technology and overall portfolio enhancement. Our partnership with salesforce.com enables us to combine Force.com’s proven technology with our domain and industry expertise in the aftermarket space,” said Roshan Pinto, practice director – service operations, Tavant Technologies. “Companies are looking to transform the way they connect with customers, partners and employees to thrive in today’s connected world,” said Ron Huddleston, senior vice president, ISV & channel, salesforce.com. “By leveraging the power of the Salesforce1 Platform, Tavant Technologies provides customers with the proven social, mobile and connected cloud technologies to accelerate business success.” Connect in a Whole New Way with Social, Mobile and Connected Cloud Technologies Tavant Warranty On-Demand provides a quick and easy solution for manufacturers to keep track of their assets and corresponding warranties; and automate their warranty claim lifecycle. It allows enterprises to manage their customer relationships from cradle to grave. It can be easily connected with Salesforce1 Sales Cloud and Salesforce1 Service Cloud to gain a detailed customer overview. Product Key Features Easy integration with Salesforce Application setup within minutes without IT support Multilingual and multicurrency support Integration with field inventory Extended warranties management Service contracts management Warranty claims management Part returns Availability Tavant Warranty On-Demand is available on Salesforce1 platform starting today, June 26, 2014. Price quote will be available on request. About the Salesforce AppExchange The Salesforce1 AppExchange is the world’s leading enterprise apps marketplace. With more than 2,200 partner apps and more than 2 million customer installs it is the most comprehensive source of social and mobile cloud apps for business. The Salesforce1 Platform is the new social, mobile and cloud customer platform for building next generation apps, powering Salesforce CRM, and more than 3 million custom apps built by customers and partners. Apps built on the Salesforce1 Platform can be easily distributed and marketed through AppExchange. Salesforce, Salesforce1, AppExchange and others are trademarks of salesforce.com, inc. About Tavant Technologies Tavant Technologies is a specialized IT solutions and services provider of choice for customers across the world. It leverages unrivaled capabilities and domain insights to provide impactful, game changing results for its customers every time, without exception. It is known for its engineering excellence, passionate employees, and long-lasting customer relationships. Founded in 2000, Tavant is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and services customers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
How to make Warranty Claims Management work for you?
It is accepted that managing warranty claims is one of the most daunting tasks in the warranty lifecycle. Managing large amounts of data brings the possibility of errors at different levels. Such errors can impact the image and overall functioning of an organization. Current trends in managing warranty claims The current trend of managing warranty claims data involves manual management. The challenge of a manual approach is its failure to integrate with the ongoing enhancements in business processes. Several other negative implications include cost mismanagement, operational discrepancies, customer dissatisfaction, and quality issues. Is there a right approach? Due to erroneous processing of warranty claims, organizations have to incur huge revenue lapses. The right approach to correcting and maintaining warranty claims is to automate all key business policies and procedures through a comprehensive warranty claims solution. A robust system will improve the claims process and assist in building strategic plans to detect product failures early. That will help shorten the claims-processing cycle and maintain the ongoing improvement of end-to-end warranty claims management. In greater numbers, organizations are opting for a closed loop warranty systems that direct, process, and track warranties as well as provide feedback for continuous improvement across product lifecycles. This helps in optimizing product pricing and improving customer satisfaction while minimizing costs. Industry Example A specialist technology provider of manufacturing advanced food-processing equipment had plans to expand its service operations across South European regions. Implementing common processes and operations of manufacturing equipment was highly critical. This would assist in streamlining the processes, building a brand image, and gaining better control of the business and revenue management. Business Challenge The organization was exploring options to enhance its productivity by scaling the existing processes. One of the processes that needed immediate improvement pertained to the warranty claims management system. As the process was managed through a manual legacy system, it hampered productivity tremendously. Problems the company faced: Ineffective claim management due to manual tracking and management systems Communication channels were not automated which led to process errors Turnaround time and resources for project completion increased Inefficient management of the highly customized legacy due to lack of manpower. As a corrective measure, and to improve product quality, customer satisfaction, and profitability, the organization decided to implement comprehensive warranty enhancement solutions. The Solution A warranty management solution with advanced predictive techniques was implemented to identify fraudulent and inappropriate claims. New rules were added to improve claims precision and ROI. The solution provided rich functionality for registrations, claims management, returns & supplier management, and parts returns. The results were astounding. 95% of warranty issues were resolved. Warranty claims dropped by more than 60% in less than 2 years. The client experienced a series of business benefits such as effective cost, time and customer management, and saved huge amounts in customer service costs. The new system was flexible, easy to maintain, and highly scalable for future business enhancements.
Tavant Warranty Systems – One for All
Among the majority of Warranty Management Systems across industries, each one is becoming highly customized to meet only one business functionality. Although customizing a system for a product or line of business helps, the conventional approach can result in multiple instances of the same application with only minor change in operation. That does not help the system attain a just price in terms of the value it adds to an organization. So what is the future then? Is it really possible to have a system that: • Can be tailored to business needs • Is cost-effective • Enables synergy between business ideas & expertise • Is a proven success • Will allow me to stop experimenting with my business continuously The short answer is YES. But how? Here at Tavant, we have built, nourished and enhanced our Warranty Management product offering ‘TWMS’– ‘Tavant Warranty Management System’ for the past 12 years. We have helped our customers, whose businesses started off with independent instances, to collaborate and merge into a single instance. The result that we have now is a powerful global system that houses all businesses, irrespective of their linguistic and zonal differences. It is meeting their specific demands and requirements, without costing them much for the value it is bringing, day in and day out, by easing the operations at work. It is natural that you might be wondering as to how that is possible when all businesses never have the same requirements. Across businesses, differences at various levels exist in terms of operation. But are businesses using TWMS compromising on system functionality or operation mode? No. We understand that every business is unique and has its own distinct operation. So we provide options in functionality. Business administrators have the option to tweak their systems as understood fit. More importantly, they are empowered to alter the course of system operations for their businesses through the system itself. If at any point a change made is found undesirable, it could be reverted. Alright, I am beginning to like this! It is pretty similar to what we want, but how does it stand out in the crowd when every other system does exactly that? It does stand out. It is a ‘Multiple Business on a Single Instance’ system. What’s more? You don’t pay for the whole system. You really needn’t write that big fat check to own the system. The cost would be shared between the businesses which are part of it. The council, comprising leaders who run the business, meet periodically to share their ideas and concepts on improving and automating the system further. So it is not just the cost that is shared. With it comes the synergy of expertise and knowledge from multiple experts, which I believe, is truly priceless. Finally, I will wind up leaving you to a choice: Lose ground by competing or share an advantage by collaborating. Let’s learn to work together when it’s the right thing to do!
Tavant at the Warranty Chain Management Conference 2014, San Diego
The 3-day event is a global platform of ideas, challenges, opportunities, and guaranteed solutions related to Warranty management. The 10th edition of Warranty Chain Management Conference is intended to appeal a diverse range of organizations. Executives, managers, senior contributors, CEOs, strategic leaders, and domain experts from service life-cycle management will share common warranty issues and solutions to aid and foster warranty management as a discipline. As warranty management continues to gain momentum, close to 500 organizations across diverse industries have announced participation at the global event in San Diego. Taking yet another leap in thought leadership, Tavant is a key sponsor of this event, where it will showcase its flexible and end-to-end Warranty solution that continues to enable manufacturing firms transform their warranty management. The subject matter experts from Tavant, along with some of its global customers, will be speaking on topics related to Building Material, Automobile Warranties and Rules-based Warranty Systems. Tavant Warranty — A Global Preference Global corporations such as Ingersoll Rand, Doosan Infracore, Federal Signal and many others have deployed our highly flexible Warranty Management Solutions to increase their aftermarket revenues with optimized extended warranties and service contracts. Our web-based, real-time, full-lifecycle, and flexible pricing model-based solution help reduce warranty spends, eliminate fraudulent claims and reduce claim processing time substantially. The event hosts a variety of presentations, workshops, panel discussions and demos. This edition is all set to get bigger and better. Don’t let this opportunity slip by! Team Tavant hopes to see you there. About the Presenters from Tavant As key presenters of the event, Tavant experts will be looking forward share valuable insights, best practices and success stories on Warranty Management. Tavant Speakers at the conference include: R. Pinto, Head of Service Operations M. Devarapalli, Senior Program Manager, Service Operations and R. Lohan, Product Manager, Service Operations Visit http://lf1.me/Vvb/WCM2014 to learn more about our participation in the event.