Warranty processing, automated

A multi-bay heavy-duty shop that services fleets and municipal units was filing warranty claims by hand, after hours, and losing weeks to rejections. Here is how they moved to same-day filing with a Torque agent doing the data entry and service writers handling only the exceptions.

Where it started

Picture a Tuesday at 6:30 pm. The bays are dark, the last tech has clocked out, and a service writer is still at the counter with a stack of closed repair orders on one side and an OEM warranty portal open on the other. He is reading part numbers off a printed RO, typing them into a form, guessing at which labor operation code the OEM wants for a fan clutch replacement, and hoping the failure note the tech scribbled is enough.

That was the warranty process. Every claim meant re-keying what was already in the shop system: VIN, mileage, parts, labor hours, cause and correction. Each OEM had its own portal, its own labor codes, and its own idea of what a complete claim looked like. Nobody had time to learn all of it, so writers did their best and submitted.

Three to five weeks later, rejections came back. Missing photo of the failed part. Wrong labor op for that engine family. Coverage expired by mileage. Each one had to be reopened, fixed, and resubmitted, which pushed reimbursement out another month. Meanwhile new ROs closed every day, so the backlog never shrank. The service manager tracked it in a spreadsheet that nobody trusted. The owner saw money sitting in receivables with no clear reason why.

The writers were not bad at their jobs. They were doing clerical work that punished small mistakes, on top of a full day of customer calls and dispatching.

What we built

Torque deployed a warranty agent that treats a closed repair order as its trigger. The workflow runs like this:

• The agent reads the closed RO from the shop system: VIN, unit and customer, parts with part numbers and quantities, labor lines with hours, tech notes on complaint, cause, and correction, and any photos attached.
• It checks coverage for that VIN against the OEM warranty terms in effect: base warranty, extended coverage, emissions coverage, and mileage or in-service date limits.
• It maps each labor line to the correct labor operation code for that OEM and engine or component family, and checks the claimed hours against the allowed time.
• It drafts the claim, fills the OEM portal form, attaches the required documents, and files it.
• It tracks the claim status and pulls updates back: accepted, paid, returned, or denied.

Exceptions are where a person steps in. If a unit is out of coverage, if the OEM requires a photo that is missing, if a labor line does not match a known operation, or if claimed hours run well above the allowance, the agent does not guess. It routes the claim to a service writer with the reason attached in plain language, for example "labor line 3 exceeds allowed time by 1.2 hours, confirm or adjust" or "OEM requires photo of failed part for this component." The writer fixes it or answers the question, and the agent picks the claim back up.

The Torque Platform keeps every claim as a record tied to the RO and to the unit. Open the unit and you see its repair history, which repairs were claimed, what each OEM paid, and what is still pending. The service manager gets a dashboard of claims by status, by OEM, and by age, so the spreadsheet is gone.

What changed

• Same-day filing. Claims filed the day the RO closes instead of days or weeks later, and no more after-hours keying.
• Fewer rejections. Because labor codes and required attachments are checked before submission, the shop sees far fewer claims come back. The ones that do come back arrive with a reason already logged against the record.
• Faster reimbursement. Filing sooner and rejecting less moved reimbursement from a months-long wait to a matter of weeks for most OEMs.
• Writers on exceptions, not typing. Writers now spend a few minutes a day on the exception queue rather than hours on data entry. The backlog is gone and has not come back.

What it took

The rollout ran about six weeks from kickoff to the agent filing claims without a person double-checking every one. The shop's service manager and one lead service writer were the main people involved, along with a Torque implementation lead. The first two weeks were spent connecting Torque to the shop management system so the agent could read closed ROs, and loading each OEM's coverage rules and labor operation tables. The next two weeks the agent drafted claims but a writer reviewed every one before filing, which is how the exception rules were tuned. After that, the writer only saw what the agent flagged.

Systems connected: the shop management system for ROs and unit records, three OEM warranty portals, and the shop's accounting system so paid claims post against the right receivable. No new hardware, and the techs' process did not change at all beyond one reminder to attach a photo of the failed part before closing the RO.

If your warranty desk looks like that Tuesday at 6:30 pm, this is a well-worn path. Reach out at torquemode.com/contact and we will walk through what your ROs, your OEMs, and your writers would need.