Product warranty logistics: Issues and challenges

Warranty is an important element of marketing new products. The servicing of warranty results in additional costs to the manufacturer. Warranty logistics deals with various issues relating to the servicing of warranty. Proper management of warranty logistics is needed not only to reduce the warranty servicing cost but also to ensure customer satisfaction as customer dissatisfaction has a negative impact on sales and revenue. Unfortunately, warranty logistics has received very little attention. The paper links the literature on warranty and on logistics and then discusses the different issues in warranty logistics. It highlights the challenges and identifies some research topics of potential interest to operational researchers. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.