Product warranty management-II: An integrated framework for study

There are many different aspects to warranty and a proper study of the subject requires a framework to integrate these in an effective manner. The systems approach offers such a framework. In this paper the authors focus our attention mainly on system characterization, the first step of the systems approach. They present alternate forms of system characterizations for the study of warranty from three different perspectives, those of the consumer, the manufacturer and the public policy decision maker. A system characterization is the starting point for model building. The authors briefly discuss the building of models for warranty study. A comprehensive review of the models developed in the past to study different aspects of warranty is done in the third of this sequence of papers.