The Need For Open IT Transaction Standards for The Warranty Industry

You just got your dream job and dream salary and followed your new companies on boarding process and entered your bank account routing # for payroll direct deposit (ACH) into your companies HR System. You are excited and start your new job and looking forward to the first big paycheck and many more to follow. Two weeks later on payday you get a call from your HR payroll department stating that your banks software does not support your companies payroll software and ACH money transfer. This means you can’t easily get paid. To make things worse your company reduced their cost by only doing online banking with no means to print you a printed paper check. Of course in 2019 the above example would never happen, why because banking in the USA and around the world work because the banking industry adopted open industry transactions standards for online banking 30 + years ago.

So why today in 2019 do Warranty Companies, Warranty & Service Platforms, Manufacturers, Service Providers, and Parts Suppliers, etc have to constantly reinvent the wheel and develop custom integration solutions to do business withall current and future business partners ? These custom integration solutions increase your IT expense for development/support, adds employees, adds more systems complexity, and adds all different kinds of technology you are stuck to purchase and support. These types of custom integration solutions can take months to get approval, develop, test, and put into production. Most of the time your late to the market and missed additional revenue that is derived from this integration. I have seen plenty of these custom integration solutions cost more to develop and support then the revenue it will ever brings in. If you have a good Cost Benefits Analysis (CBA) process in place some of these custom integration development will never be approved if it does not have a short term return oninvestment which should be 6 months to a year.

Over the years my IT teams have developed 100’s of custom data interfaces to and from all types of systems, computer languages, and technology. All these interfaces were duplicate business process like Price and Availability, Order Entry, Order Inquiry, Returns, etc. The problem is we had to support all kinds of data formats and technology from different clients and partners systems. Each and every interface was a unique data format like text files, CSV Files, Excel Files, web service xml, web services json, etc. Also unique were security and authorization to data and web services everything from basic user name/password, to Open Auth, to custom written token authorization process and data encryption. We can’t continue this madness along with the major expenses in development and related support. What are the options ?

As a industry you need to get together and draft and approve common business transactions sets, required data elements, data attributes, protocols, and security/ authorization. Then publish the standards and enforce the use and refrain from everyone building one off solutions. The bigger the company and the dollar amount of the business transactions the more leverage you have over your business partners to adopt and support the new open standards. Going forward with the new standards it is a matter of adding new business partners and configuration to your software, test with your partners, then put your new business partner into production in days over weeks or months that the custom software development cycle takes. You need to immediately start contacting your account representatives at Warranty Companies, Warranty & Service Platforms, Manufacturers, Service Providers and Parts Suppliers and demand them to get together as a industry to create and develop open industry transactions standards. Also push the need for open industry transactions standards with your industry association and at your industry conferences. Feel free to pass this article to all your contacts in the industry.

Custom middleware is also a option. Middleware software is used to enable communication and management of data between different systems and data formats. Extract Transform Load or ETL is the actual process that happens to the data to change it from one format to another. Extract data from your businesspartner. Transform the data from your business partner into your supported format. Load the transformed data into your system for transaction processing. Instead of every company purchasing and configuring their own middleware, I think there is a great business opportunity to create a new technology based company that makes revenue on a transaction fee or subscription to provide real time ETL web services to and from all major industry partners and data formats. I am looking for business partners and funding to start this company. The benefits to all industry partners is they develop and expense all their interfaces once and never have to develop additional interfaces when working with any new business partner.

Daniel Kozlowski is President of DRK Resources Tech that specializes inManufacturer and Extended Warranty Systems for Manufactures, Warranty
Insurance Companies, Warranty Third Party Administrators, Parts Suppliers, Service Providers, and Big Box Retailers. He has over 25 years working with some of the biggest global warranty insurance companies, warranty TPA’s, big box retailers, service platforms, and auto dealer group. Please give me a call for help with IT for Warranty Systems. He is available to speak on IT Warranty topics like this at industry conferences and industry associations.