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This case study aims to develop and empirically test a general framework for the implementation and evaluation of a warranty policy (i.e. implementation, support structure, and evaluation stages) within the context of a high‐tech global firm.

The sample consisted of the employees of an anonymous US‐based global high tech firm.

The findings for the implementation stage report that the cost and profit centers should have their costs allocated on the basis of activity. For the support structure, there is a negative response to outsourcing as an option for implementing the warranty policy. For the evaluation, findings report that US firms should reevaluate their pricing, quality, and warranty strategy for domestic and international markets.

This case study can be expanded by examining how companies balance the cost/quality/warranty ability of the product, the techniques used to allocate warranty costs, and to evaluate multiple companies/industries, perhaps with a longitudinal focus.

Findings report that the budgeted costs should be allocated depending on the type of incident. The majority of outsourcing opponents consisted of service personnel while those in favor were from product marketing departments. Also, the US firms need to provide written warranty information to their customers.

The proposed framework will satisfy a current, critical need to provide guidelines for the steps needed to implement and evaluate a warranty policy within a context of a high tech global company. Additionally, this case research study's key contribution lies in its attempt to address warranty management processes within a multitude of a firm's departments. Furthermore, the anonymous high tech company used in this study was chosen as a sample because the company offered a wide range of products, warranties, and service options. The company also utilized a vast reseller base to sell and service its products. This method offered the potential to gain better insight with regards to the role of resellers in a warranty program. It also marketed products and services to six specific industries: financial, retail, transportation, manufacturing, communications, and the public. This broad industrial perspective gave the study added cross‐industries' insight in reference to implementation and evaluation of a good warranty policy since the anonymous high tech company considers these industries to be sustainable industries in the USA and abroad.

Construction defects in residential buildings are causing significant impacts both on consumers and the industry. As a consequence, several countries have established new home warranty schemes. However, designing a public policy for domestic building warranties can become a difficult task. In fact, many of these programs in the past have failed, collapsed or gone bankrupt. Therefore, the purpose of the current research is to provide a systematic comparative representation of various active programs internationally.

The methodology relied on a multiple-case study research design. The case selection covered a total of nine jurisdictions with compulsory home warranty programs. Those included Japan, France, United Kingdom, three provinces in Canada (Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta), and three states in Australia (New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland). The study applied a data collection protocol to gather all the evidence in a replicable manner for each individual case. Subsequently, a cross-case analysis was conducted to identify similarities and variations between programs.

The findings unveiled institutional practices that aimed to resolve, compensate, or rectify defects in residential constructions within these countries. The review mostly suggested that every home warranty program presents certain unique characteristics. At the end, this paper proposed an analytical illustration representing the diversification of components adopted by each jurisdiction.

Nowadays, there is still not a consensus within the academic community on what is an optimal solution when conceiving a new home warranty program. Hence, the current study aims to fill this knowledge gap by presenting the plurality of methods employed by several countries. This paper seeks to help policy makers and industry leaders to improve their home warranty scheme based on awareness derived from observations and analyses of what has been accomplished elsewhere in the world.

The authors consider a system which is a part of a complex equipment (e.g. aircraft, automobile, medical equipment, production machine, etc.), and which consists of N independent series subsystems. The purpose of this paper is to determine simultaneously the system design (reliability) and its preventive maintenance (PM) replacements periodicity which minimize the total average cost per time unit over the equipment useful life, taking into account a minimum required reliability level between consecutive replacements.

The problem is tackled in the context of reliability-based design (RBD) considering at the same time the burn-in of components, the warranty commitment and the maintenance strategy to be adopted. A mathematical model is developed to express the total average cost per time unit to be minimized under a reliability constraint. The total average cost includes the cost of acquiring and assembling components, the burn-in of each component, preventive and corrective replacements performed during the warranty and post-warranty periods. A numerical procedure is proposed to solve the problem.

For any given set of input data including components reliability, their cost and the costs of their preventive and corrective replacements, the system design (reliability) and the periodicity of preventive replacement during the post-warranty period is obtained such as the system’s total average cost per time unit is minimized. The obtained results clearly indicate that a decrease in the number of PM actions to be performed during the post-warranty period increases the number of components to be added at each subsystem at the design stage.

Given that the objective function (cost rate function) to be minimized is non-linear and involves several integer variables, it has not been possible to derive the optimal solution. A numerical procedure based on a heuristic approach has been proposed to solve the problem finding a nearly optimal solution for a given set of input data.

This paper offers to manufacturers a comprehensive approach to look for the most economical combination of the reliability level to be given to their products at the design stage, on one hand, and the PM policy to be adopted, on the other hand, given the offered warranty and service for the products and reliability requirements during the life cycle.

While the RBD problem has been largely treated, most of the published works have focussed on the development or the improvement of solving techniques used to find the optimal configuration. In this paper the authors provide a more comprehensive approach that considers simultaneously RBD, the burn-in and warranty periods, along with the maintenance policy to be adopted. The authors also consider the context of products whose component failures cannot be rectified through repair actions. They can only be fixed by replacement.

The purpose of this paper is to address what a sound warranty policy entails by identifying the key variables involved in the development of a warranty program.

The sample population was composed of employees in the US division involved with high‐tech product warranties. A survey questionnaire was used to collect data from the participants.

The paper finds that the formality of the warranty policy should depend on its complexity. Differences exist between types of warranty based on the product knowledge of the buyer. Although a standardized warranty is easy to administer, as the product line diversifies, it becomes more challenging to standardize.

This study can be expanded by examining how companies balance the cost/quality/warranty ability of the product, the techniques used to allocate warranty costs, and to evaluate multiple companies/industries, perhaps with a longitudinal focus.

The formality can be used to communicate the product warranty throughout the organization. Each department has a responsibility to the customer, so team members from service, product development, and marketing should plan and develop the warranty. A standardized warranty can send a clearer message to a customer about a firm's products. Simplifying front and back‐end processing and streamlining support structures can reduce costs.

In this paper, the identified key variable is brought out in warranty management framework. The development of this framework will satisfy a current, critical need to provide guidelines with all the steps needed to develop a warranty policy.

Describes an attempt in Israel to put a “product” emphasis on a service environment, through offering guests on a vacation a service warranty that they will provide a “perfect vacation” ‐ or meet the guaranteed penalties in terms of compensation. Describes the nature of the warranty to be offered, and focuses on factors identified through focus groups with existing customers; describes the efforts and results around the launch of the scheme, and concludes with a valuable section on the lessons learned.

The purpose of this study is to identify and to assess specific political risks associated with Indonesia's public private partnership (PPP) power projects and their generally available mitigating measures, based on the perception of the main stakeholders (government, investors, lenders and insurers).

The approach taken is: a comprehensive literature review to identify an initial list of specific political risks associated with Indonesia's PPP power projects and generally available mitigating measures for these risks; unstructured interviews and discussions to gather recent issues related to the study and to filter the risks and project measures identified at previous step; and finally a survey conducted with questionnaires in order to evaluate the risks and their allocation, to suggest corresponding mitigating measures.

The study identified that the political risk perception for Indonesian power projects is still relatively high, due to its legal and regulatory risk and breach of contract risk. Viable government support is also desired by most of the players instead of having political risk insurance as the risk mitigation strategy.

The study has identified a political risk mitigation strategy for infrastructure investment in the Indonesian power sector. Based on that, this study contributes as a scientific exercise in measuring the political risks perception of all stakeholders, which can be useful for all involved parties to mitigate this type of risk successfully.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on challenges and facilitating factors of open innovation practices (OIP) implemented by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The empirical research has been conducted on eight SMEs operating in the ICT sector, through a qualitative approach involving comparative case studies.

The findings drawn from the interviews indicate that each OIP established entails specific challenges and facilitating factors that SMEs have to face to sustain the open innovation journey and foster competitiveness. These findings helped to draw some important managerial implications and provide insights to SMEs willing to open innovation processes.

The study identifies OIP used in empirical studies to explore specific challenges and facilitators for each OIP, in the context of SMEs. Previous studies mostly focussed on open innovation sources and scarcely investigated internal dynamics of specific OIP.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how big data can shape ambidextrous business process management (BPM) in terms of exploitation and exploration.

A qualitative methodology involving case studies has been chosen to explore the impact of big data deployment on exploitative and explorative business processes.

The results of case studies offer some opportunities and challenges for service firms related to both the exploitative and the explorative aspects of BPM driven by big data.

The deployment of big data in business processes has attracted a large amount of interest recently. However, these studies are mostly conceptual, so empirical research about this complex relationship is quite rare, especially research with specific arguments regarding exploitative and explorative activities. This paper aims to fill this gap by offering empirical evidence for big data-driven business processes.

The purpose of this paper is to present a brief summary of quality and contractual aspects for the improvement of the warranty management. Together with this, the present work will show also some of the best practices followed by companies in order to manage properly those kinds of issues related to warranty, as well as some indications to assess the implementation degree of such practices in the whole organization. Basically, the global objective of the study is to present to the reader and in few words the importance of taking into account legal and quality aspects, when a company offers a technical service for the warranty assistance of any of its products, together with the maturity level that this company achieves applying some best practices currently available.

The study starts by mentioning some antecedents related to warranty, in order to summarize a reference framework, proposed for proper warranty management, and how the information exchange should be performed among the different departments of a generic company. Then, it will be suggested how to apply this according to a strategic management which is divided in phases, taken from the product life cycle concept: Front‐end, Design and Development, Production, Marketing, and Post‐sale Support. These phases are included in three higher stages considered as Pre‐Launch stage, Launch and Post‐Launch stage, where different decisions play important roles. Afterwards, it will be shown how warranty management is viewed from the contract and legal point of view, in order to link the above mentioned topics on generic management, with those best practices currently presented in actual markets. Finally, once analysed, all those aspects related to best practices and its application on the reference framework, it is required now to quantify how a company manages the warranty assistances by a maturity assessment on warranty management.

The paper observes what today's companies are doing in this field, that is, their best practices in warranty management covering the quality and contractual aspects already mentioned, in order to round off the development of a completed framework for such management.

The paper presents a review, a framework and a practical application of the framework for the management of warranty contracts, including a maturity assessment or evaluation.

This paper proposes optimisation models to evaluate and examine the selling of extended warranty policies in terms of improved profits in producing/marketing remanufactured products. These models are numerically solved using a quadratic programming solution approach and implemented in the decision support system (DSS).

The purpose of this paper is to develop the optimisation models for a DSS and evaluate different warranty policies for buyers.

This study has demonstrated the flexibility and usefulness of a model-driven DSS for the quality and warranty management, which is applied to examine and evaluate different configurations (i.e. component reuse, rebuild and recycle) for remanufactured products and propose the selling of extended warranty policies for buyers.

The developed model-driven DSS can assist manufacturers to select and increase the number of components, e.g. to be reused, rebuilt, and recycled for producing a remanufactured product and propose suitable warranty policies for buyers. However, this study focusses only on the evaluation of warranty policies for specific remanufactured products in a DSS, i.e. types of air compressors for production operations in manufacturing industry.

This study developed optimisation models to be used in a DSS for proposing the selling of extended warranty of a remanufactured product to improve customer satisfaction and maximise the gained profits for manufacturers.