Maytag Appliances Consumer Services Maintains Quality Heritage Using SAS® Warranty Analysis

With hundreds of R&D engineers, data analysts, quality assurance professionals and customer service representatives hard at work behind the scenes, Maytag Appliances makes sure that each generation of appliances are better than the generation before.

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Randy Wadle
VP & BIO, Information Technology, Maytag Appliances

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Linda Coffey
Manager of information development, Maytag Appliances

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Dale Reeder
Vice President of Operations, Maytag Appliances

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To ensure that products are top quality, Maytag Appliances relies on an innovative SAS enterprise warranty analysis solution to bring intelligence and analytics to the Newton, Iowa-based major appliance manufacturer.

With their SAS warranty analysis system, Maytag Appliances was able to:

• Release a major deliverable in less than 90 days.
• Add statistical analysis to automatically identify emerging concerns.
• Shorten the warranty analysis reporting cycle time by more than 30 days.
• Eliminate more than 1,200 static paper reports with online access to information.
• Engage cross-functional groups into the warranty process – including engineering, manufacturing, quality, customer service, and executive management.
• Incorporate more than 90 percent of project requirements into one solution with statistical analysis, online interface, easy-to-use reporting, robust/interactive graphs and excellent technical support.

"Because we produce so many innovative products at Maytag Appliances," says Mike Duffus, senior quality improvement specialist for Maytag Appliances, "we require a lot of information as quickly as we can get it. Our SAS warranty system helps us to analyze our customers' perception of the products that we build. This knowledge allows us to increase customer satisfaction and preserve our quality heritage."

Maytag Corporation, a $4.3 billion home and commercial appliance manufacturer, is among the top three companies of its kind in the North American market. Maytag Appliances offers a full line of washers, dryers, dishwashers, refrigerators and ranges marketed under the Maytag, Amana, Jenn-Air and Magic Chef brands. Maytag Corporation also owns the Hoover brand of vacuum cleaners and floor-care products as well as Dixie-Narco vending equipment.

Maintaining Quality with Quick Access to Information
Maytag Appliances maintains its standing and respect in the marketplace by continually providing consumers with quality products. Maytag Appliances utilizes consumer feedback from warranty forms to capture the essence of the consumer experience. Information derived from the warranty analysis then is used to support on-going quality initiatives throughout Maytag Appliances. Before turning to SAS for a warranty analysis solution, Maytag generated more than 1,200 static reports each month. Only a few associates could generate the monthly reports and distribute them to each manufacturing site. These associates were also inundated with ad hoc reporting for other "special" requests, which could take days and sometimes weeks to complete depending on available resources.

"People need information more than once a month, and they need information that they can quickly retrieve," explains Linda Coffey, manager of information development at Maytag Appliances. "If they are working on a special project to make changes within a product, then they need to know what the customer experience is with that product after it leaves the plant."

Delays in receipt of information equate to cost. Reducing the time spent evaluating data for the purpose of implementing changes is cost-effective. Maytag Appliances needed a warranty analysis system with both speed and brains – one that could point out potential issues, and one that would allow users to view warranty information and drill down through the layers of data in minutes instead of months – so a SAS-based system proved to be the right choice to meet Maytag's warranty analysis needs.

"One of the greatest things about our new online SAS warranty analysis system is that we can take a graph and drill it all the way down to the individual customer experience. We know exactly what the customer said," says Duffus. "SAS gives us the ability to maintain our quality goals by helping to identify potential issues and reducing the resolution cycle time. We're able to look at that information and ask ourselves what we can do to improve it. At Maytag Appliances, it's all about quality, and with SAS we're much faster and more proactive than ever before."

1,200 Fewer Reports with SAS
Maytag has evolved from a world of "paper, paper and more paper," as Duffus describes it, "to one of dynamic online trend analysis and reporting with SAS software. This lets Maytag users stay on top of what's happening to the products in the weeks and months following a purchase --all the way to the end of the warranty period."

"With minimal training, our IT professionals delivered more than 90 percent of the Maytag Appliance objectives as outlined in the initial warranty analysis project," reports Coffey. "With varying cross-functional programming backgrounds, the Maytag Appliances IT team quickly and easily adapted to the SAS environment. Of course, they did call upon the SAS Technical Support team for assistance on occasion. The SAS Technical Support team was great. They quickly provided feedback to the Maytag Appliances team whenever it was needed."

Coffey continues, "Thanks to the significant impact that our online SAS warranty analysis system has had, other groups across Maytag Appliances are eager to utilize the intelligence of the SAS environment to develop dynamic applications for their information – a real testament to the software's effectiveness."

With the SAS warranty analysis solution, Maytag Appliances updates data daily instead of monthly. Reports that once took 30 days now take seconds, and Coffey's group is producing 1,200 fewer warranty analysis reports thanks to SAS' ability to drill straight down to the most granular level of detail.

"What the user was looking for could have been buried in those 1,200 reports," adds Rob Carpenter, Maytag Appliances programmer analyst who worked on the project. "Relying on those paper-based reports, it may have taken several days to even find something worth asking more questions about. Potentially, using the SAS system, the time savings is even greater than 30 days."

SAS Identifies, Prevents Potential Costs
Alerts about specific items are built into the SAS system and are transmitted directly to platform leaders via Lotus Notes e-mail. With the information at their fingertips, they can quickly and easily tap into the secure warranty analysis system's Web site to review warranty information. "Now with our SAS warranty analysis application directly accessible through our Maytag Corporation intranet, our platform leaders have made a strategic leap toward interacting with consumer feedback – they can use SAS to analyze information and make data-based decisions faster than ever before," says Coffey.

Prior to SAS, Maytag had to constantly monitor trends from static, monthly reports. "Today the SAS warranty analysis system monitors information for us and alerts us to potential concerns. That's a real plus," Duffus says. "With SAS, the speed at which we're making good decisions has increased tremendously, and that gives us the opportunity to make even better decisions. I look for this in the future to keep building on itself."

The SAS warranty analysis system is helping to reduce costs by freeing up time for Maytag associates, allowing them to focus on more value added tasks. "Their time is more efficiently spent by using the knowledge acquired from the SAS warranty analysis system rather than waiting for or manually analyzing monthly static reports – not to mention the preparation time and paper saved by eliminating those 1,200 reports," Coffey says. "Today Maytag Appliances leaders have a broader view with data that is refreshed everyday. They are resolving business opportunities in ways they never could have before. In that respect, SAS allows us to remain focused on our quality."

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