We typically see this process being used by dealers who have a technician bonus program tied to parts usage and those techs will care that they get credit. If you do not bonus your techs on parts, then simply apply the credit against the contract to ensure contract profitability is accurate. However, you have no way to ensure that the manufacturer pays you for all claims submitted unless you track them. As an additional best practice, we suggest an additional GL account for Warranty Credits, perhaps one for supplies and one for parts.
In an ideal world, if a manufacturer gave you a credit back on a warranty claim you would want to credit the contract AND the technician.
Right now, the only way to affect the technicians' parts usage numbers in our reports, BEI's reports, and e-automate's reports is to put a negative quantity of the warranted part on the service call. That washes out the quantity installed on the call so the net effect to all reports for parts usage is $0.
That puts a quantity into the technician's defective bin that has to be processed by your warehouse through an inventory transfer to a vendor RTV warehouse when the part is physically returned. Then you process the vendor RTV accordingly. If the warranty claim is invalid, the RTV is cancelled and the quantity is adjusted out. Defective bin quantities are not shown as available and are used as a placeholder to track movement from tech to office to vendor.
Please see sample steps on service call:
All of that is the only way currently to have warranty part credits impact a tech's parts usage on all of the reports.
Of course, you want to be confident that the warranty claim will be valid, so best practice is to have someone process the claim online and confirm it's valid before putting the negative quantity on the call. This requires that you have your techs return all parts or something like have a box for each day in the car and dispose of the contents by that day the following week if the parts guy has not requested them back.
Now, if you don’t care about the tech getting credit for the warranty part, the Customer RMA process will allow you to tag an RMA to a contract/Equipment record which resolves contract profitability and credits the reports accordingly. But the RMA does not let us reference a tech or call number, so the tech never gets credit.
Best practice would be to do the warranty check first, then add the negative quantity if the manufacturer says warrantable.
We are happy to chat in detail about this and we've mentioned to ECi that optimally there would be the ability to have the RTV process have a feature to ‘Cancel’ a defective return as ‘Invalid’ and have that offset the defective quantity on the call and the tech's warehouse, but they haven’t responded yet.
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