Most organizations buy warranty software backwards, often neglecting the critical stage of Warranty Process Readiness. They select a technology vendor, sign a licensing deal, and then try to shove their current operations into the new system. This approach almost always leads to budget overruns and missed deadlines because the business didn't truly understand its own warranty workflows before the project started.
At Detering Consulting, we see this pattern constantly across aerospace, automotive, and industrial manufacturing sectors. Executives want to stop revenue leakage and automate claim processing, so they purchase SAP ACS (Automotive Consulting Solutions, not limited to Auto industries) or S/4HANA Service. However, they often skip the most critical step: the diagnostic phase we call the QuickScan.
A QuickScan is not a sales meeting; it is a two to four-week deep dive that acts as a reality check for your aftermarket service organization. It forces you to look at how your warranty, RMA management, and service contracts actually work, not just how they are written in an outdated manual. This exercise is the only way to build a scope that holds up during a complex SAP warranty management implementation.
Without this critical upfront work, your organization is essentially guessing at technical requirements, which inevitably leads to costly project delays. These guesses result in frequent change orders that destroy your expected ROI and frustrate stakeholders. This article outlines why a structured readiness assessment is mandatory for any enterprise considering a move to SAP warranty solutions.
Are you an SAP customer but not satisfied with your warranty claims processing solution? Ask us about the Warranty QuickScan!
Optimizing Warranty Process Readiness:
Solving the Fragmentation Problem in Operations
Warranty is rarely owned by a single department, which remains the fundamental challenge for most global manufacturers. The quality team handles technical analysis, the warehouse manages returns logistics, finance deals with supplier recovery, and sales teams often negotiate special terms for big clients. Each of these groups uses different systems, which complicates the claim processing lifecycle and creates data silos.
You might have a quality engineer tracking failure rates in a spreadsheet while the logistics manager uses a legacy ERP system to track shipments. When you decide to implement a unified SAP S/4HANA solution, you have to bridge these gaps effectively. If you don't map these disconnects early, your system integrator will build a solution that fails to support the actual aftermarket service workflow.
We often find that "global" processes are not actually global in practice. A division in Germany might handle claim processing validation completely differently than a division in the United States. If you configure the warranty software based on the US model, the German team will refuse to use it. This fragmentation is the primary driver of implementation failure in large-scale enterprises.
- Warranty data is often siloed across finance, quality, and logistics departments.
- Regional differences in process execution can derail global software rollouts.
- Ignoring process fragmentation leads to costly change orders later in the project.
Defining the QuickScan:
A Strategic Tool for SAP Warranty Management
The QuickScan is a productized service approach we developed after two decades of SAP warranty management implementations. It serves as a pre-project phase that de-risks the entire initiative before significant capital is committed. This is not about gathering requirements for a system you have already bought; it is about determining what you actually need to ensure Warranty Process Readiness.
We typically spend two to four weeks engaged with your team to perform workshops and remote analysis. The goal is to produce a record, the QuickScan document, that acts as the source of truth for the project manager. When scope creep inevitably tries to enter the project later, you can refer back to the QuickScan findings to defend the timeline and budget.
This exercise uncovers the assumptions that no one is aware of within the current aftermarket service structure. For example, your IT director might assume that supplier recovery is handled in SAP. The QuickScan might reveal that it is actually handled via email and manual invoices, identifying a gap that saves you from a nasty surprise during the blueprinting phase.
Executing the Assessment Phase for Scalable Warranty Automation
We structure the QuickScan to move fast while capturing deep detail across your entire claim processing landscape. This isn't a passive interview process; it is an active investigation into your data, your contracts, and your physical workflows to enable true warranty automation.
Steps to a Successful Warranty Assessment
Map the Physical and Financial Flow
We trace a warranty claim from the moment a customer calls to the final financial settlement. This includes tracking the physical part return and the flow of money.
Identify Entitlement Logic
We ask how you verify if a claim is valid. This involves reviewing contracts, date codes, duplicate claims checking, and serial number tracking, and many other aspects, to see where leakage occurs.
Inventory the "Shadow IT"
We locate every spreadsheet, Access database, and side application your teams use to manage warranty tasks. These must be modeled in SAP.
Define the Software Bill of Materials
Based on the findings, we determine exactly which SAP modules are necessary. This prevents over-buying or under-provisioning licenses.
Uncovering "Shadow Processes" to Prevent Revenue Leakage and Claims Fraud
One of the most valuable part of the QuickScan is finding the "shadow processes" that bypass official warranty workflows. These are the workflows that do not exist in any official documentation but are vital to the daily business. In almost every engagement, we find that the official process map covers only about 75% of what actually happens on the ground.
For instance, we worked with a marine electronics manufacturer who believed their RMA management process was standard across the globe. During the QuickScan, we found that their Asian distribution center was manually inspecting every return before issuing credit, while the North American center issued credit automatically upon receipt. This discrepancy meant that the "standard" SAP warranty management configuration would have broken the Asian operation.
These shadow processes also hide financial risks and contribute to significant revenue leakage. We often find that companies pay claims they shouldn't because the entitlement check is too difficult and time consuming to perform manually. By uncovering this behavior, we can design an automated entitlement check in SAP S/4HANA that stops this leakage immediately, often paying for the entire implementation.
Look closely at how your team handles "goodwill" claims. These are often used to bypass broken warranty processes and can represent massive financial leakage.
The Decision Gate: Choosing SAP Standard vs. SAP ACS Warranty Management
One of the primary outputs of the QuickScan is a clear recommendation on software selection for your aftermarket service needs. Many companies assume they need the most expensive, feature-rich solution available. Others try to save money by sticking to basic S/4HANA Service functionality, but both approaches carry significant operational risk.
The QuickScan serves as a decision prerequisite for achieving full Warranty Process Readiness. It helps you decide whether to proceed with SAP standard warranty or if you truly require the advanced SAP ACS warranty management solution and any of our add-on packages. We work closely with the SAP ACS development team in Germany, so we know exactly what the advanced solution can do that the standard version cannot.
If your warranty logic is simple—for example, if you just replace parts under a standard 12-month contract—standard SAP might be enough. However, if you have complex entitlement frameworks, cascading warranties, or intricate supplier recovery models, standard SAP will require heavy customization. In these cases, purchasing the SAP ACS extension is actually the cheaper long-term option because it handles this complexity out of the box.
We use the data from the assessment to build the exact order list for SAP Germany. This ensures you only pay for the software pieces you actually need to run your business effectively.
Building a Business Case for Digital Transformation in Aftermarket Warranty
Getting budget approval for a digital transformation in aftermarket service and warranty is notoriously difficult. CFOs often view warranty as a cost center rather than a value driver. To get investment, you must prove that the project will deliver a tangible return. The QuickScan is designed to deliver a board-defensible business case based on real data.
We do not just list technical requirements; we quantify the value of the transformation. By analyzing your historical claim processing data during the assessment, we can project specific savings. We might find that you are recovering only 40% of eligible costs from your suppliers, then show how the SAP solution will increase that recovery to 90%.
We also look at administrative costs and labor efficiency. If your current process requires five people to touch every claim, and the new system reduces that to one person, there is a clear gain. These hard numbers turn a "technical upgrade" into a strategic financial initiative, shifting the conversation from "how much does this cost?" to "how much money will we lose if we don't do this?"
The goal is to free warranty analysts from routine, mundane, tedious tasks so they can focus on difficult, more strategic analysis, generating insights that management actively requests, relies on for decision-making, and that are both more rewarding and more career-advancing.
💡 Key Takeaways
- A QuickScan provides the data needed to choose between SAP Standard and SAP ACS.
- Quantifying supplier recovery leakage creates a strong ROI argument for the CFO.
- The assessment output acts as a scope shield against future project creep.
Conclusion
Rushing into an SAP warranty implementation without a clear map is a gamble most businesses cannot afford. The financial and operational risks are simply too high for modern manufacturing leaders. By treating the assessment phase as a mandatory prerequisite for Warranty Process Readiness, you protect your budget and your timeline.
The QuickScan offers upfront assurance to clients that our productized service approach is a project de-risking tool. It bridges the gap between high-level business strategy and the nuts-and-bolts execution of warranty software. Whether you operate nationally or globally, understanding your true warranty exposure is the first step toward modernization.
Don't let your warranty project become a statistic of failed implementation. Start with the facts. Define the scope. Uncover the hidden processes. Only then should you order the software. This is how successful aftermarket service transformations happen.
What is the Warranty QuickScan?
The SAP Warranty QuickScan by Detering Consulting is a short, high-impact assessment that uncovers where warranty risk and margin leakage exist today—and what to do about it. In 2–4 weeks, it delivers quantified financial exposure, prioritized improvement opportunities, and a board-level justification for action. The outcome is not just insight, but a ready-to-execute SAP Warranty project plan.