Guarantee Claims - The service

“Think about it this way”, explained my colleague, “You have to purchase a set of Computers for your company from a dealer; you would first sign an SLA(service level agreement) which would include all the details regarding the dealers service, e.g. their response time(i.e. the time taken for their response when they are called for upon any complaints with the product) or the product replacement time. This is somewhat equivalent to guarantee claims for Ships”. And he, who was once the Captain of a Ship, went on to explain in detail the process of guarantee claims.

When the explanation completed, I concluded that it is really tough to manage and track the guarantee claims for Ships. The ships personnel involve people from all over the world. The ship’s yard would be in Denmark, its parts would have been made in Korea, while the ship would be currently sailing somewhere close to South Africa. How difficult it would be to track the guarantee claims of a specific defective part in such a situation. The simplest yet the most effective solution that we got, “Build a Service”.

Guarantee Claims thus took shape from the thought process. Guarantee Claims is built as a service that assists in keeping track of guarantee claims for new equipments that have warranty from the yard, supplier or manufacturer. The system can be used to exchange data related to the claims within or outside the ship's personnel.

Service meaning every step is carried out online on the site, clients can get started the very next moment they are registered on the site. The personnel related to a ship would be able to access the same content, given the privileges, and modify them as and when required. This being a web-based application, we couldn’t think of any other robust technology that could provide high level of security for the important data than Struts (a Java based web-technology), not to forget the fact that we have a dedicated and competent team of professionals for Struts. The decision was unanimous.

Guarantee Claims is designed to:

* manage logs of guarantee claims

* describe the consequences of a product failure and follow up until it is fixed

* track the correspondence (e.g. emails) regarding the guarantee claim

* track the actions and costs related to the product failure

* involve personnel related to the ship in the data exchange

The users would be able to enter information into the system through the simple step by step process. Thanks to the presence of two top level mariners in our organization who provided sufficient domain information through our interaction at each step, the process was fully designed keeping in mind the requirements of mariners, and hence the user of the system can avoid input errors.

Guarantee Claims contains modules for generating reports with a wide range of filters(e.g. date on which the claim was created, days overdue for reply/resolution, yard name, ship name etc.) so that you narrow down your search to the claim relevant to you.

Documents can also be generated and you can include attachments like drawings, images, forms, reports and other correspondence to it.

Guarantee Claims allows you to manage consequences, in terms of costs or man-hours, and log them for each claim. These logs may be added, modified or deleted. All corrective actions taken onboard are indicated.

Guarantee Claims allows you to manage the Status of a claim. You can also modify a claim's ENA(estimated time for next action) or ETR(estimated time for resolution) to allow alerts to be sent to you regarding that particular claim. Alerts are also sent when the 'Days Overdue' for a claim (for reply and for resolution) exceeds the period mentioned in the SLA(service level agreement) of the equipment's manufacturer. It also keeps track of who has been notified about the claim and who has been inspecting it.

In short words, Guarantee Claims has been developed to save the time for you to get information about the claims as everything you need is available at a single location, thus reducing administrative burden. No paperwork, which means you get more time to relax.