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Solution · Operations & quality

Built from the repair order the day it closes, checked before the importer ever sees it

Warranty work paid by the manufacturer at first submission

Robots assemble every warranty claim from the closed repair order, check it against the brand's rejection rules and submit it; rejections, parts returns and unpaid claims become tasks in Teams.

DepartmentalMicrosoft TeamsHuman in the loopAI where it earns its place
1,350warranty claims a month leave the nine workshops of this illustrative dealer group for four importer portals; about one in six comes back on the first attempt.

Executive summary

Challenge

The repair is done once; the claim is built twice by your best administrator and paid in the third month.

What changes

A repair order closing as warranty or campaign in the DMS is the trigger.

Business value

Claims leave the day after the order closes with the same evidence every time.

Systems involved

claim entry in each importer portal; claim numbers and statuses written back to the DMS; evidence packs on SharePoint

Business problem

Warranty administration

A warranty repair is free for the customer and paid by the manufacturer; the claim is the invoice. It carries VIN, mileage, complaint, diagnosis, defect and causal-part codes, labour operations at standard times, parts at purchase price plus handling, and attachments: diagnostic protocol, photographs of the failed part and its number, an authorisation number for larger repairs. Each importer has its own portal, vocabulary and list of what makes a claim unpayable; four brands means four of everything, known in full by one administrator per site.

The failure is in the paperwork, not the repair. A claim built days later from a paper order and a phone gallery fails for reasons unrelated to the car: a labour code renumbered in spring, a missing part-number photograph, mileage past the coverage line, a missing prior authorisation. The rejection is a line in a status list; somebody has to notice it, find the order, ask the technician, and submit again. Meanwhile the replaced part waits for a return request, and one that cannot be found turns a paid claim into a debit.

Aftersales sees workshop revenue in the ledger and not in the bank. Finance sees a receivable ageing in the importer's rhythm and audit debits on claims paid a year earlier. Site directors see it when the administrator takes leave and the rejection rate a month later says how that went.

How it works today

  1. PersonThe technician writes the diagnosis and the replaced part on the job card, photographs the part and closes his labour lines; the adviser closes the order as warranty
  2. WaitingThe order joins the tray on the administrator's desk and waits for a batch, typically two to five days
  3. PersonThe administrator reads the job card, finds the operation and standard time in the manual, checks the parts lines and the return shelf, and types the claim into the portal; photographs come by email
  4. SystemThe portal accepts the claim; the claim number is written on the paper order and, at some sites, into a workbook
  5. PersonA rejection is noticed when someone checks the status list and the claim is rebuilt from the paper order and memory; a part requested for return is found on the shelf, or is not
  6. Risk of errorPayments arrive on a statement netted against other items; short payments, missed returns and audit debits surface at month-end or never
PersonWaitingSystemRisk of error

Why the current process costs more than it appears

The most expensive part of this process has no cost line.

  • Rework is the expensive half: a rejected claim costs the assembly time twice plus the time to find out why, and lands on the most senior person in the office.
  • Money waits in the gap: between repair and payment the group has bought the part, paid the technician and financed a free repair, and every rejection adds a statement cycle.
  • Parts returned late, or not at all, turn paid claims into debits, months after anyone could still have found the part.
  • Knowledge of what each importer rejects lives with one person per site; her holiday shows in the rejection rate a month later, and her leaving shows for a year.

Cost of inaction

Twelve months of claims built from paper orders at nine workshops≈ €116,640
Three years, four portals, one administrator per site≈ €350,000
If two more workshops join and the group files 1,650 claims a month (per year)≈ €142,600

Cash is the larger cost, and it is absent from the table above: a claim that comes back twice is paid from the third statement, a part not returned in time turns a paid claim into a debit, and an audit that finds no photograph charges the repair back a year later. Their size depends on your brands' terms, so we leave them unpriced.

Dependence grows with every brand added: what each importer rejects, its return deadlines and authorisation thresholds live with one experienced person per site, and a fifth brand adds a fifth vocabulary to the same desk.

Illustrative scenario

A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.

Organisation

A dealer group in Poland: four brands, one premium, nine authorised workshops on seven sites, about 520 employees, one DMS per brand, four importer warranty portals, one warranty administrator per site, Microsoft 365 E3.

Volume

1,350 warranty and campaign claims a month across nine workshops; in the modelled case about 16% come back on first submission for a code, an attachment or a missing authorisation.

Current process

Claims built in batches from paper job cards, photographs forwarded by email, claim numbers written on the orders, statuses checked by hand, statements reconciled at month-end in a workbook.

Bottleneck

About 18 minutes per claim, blended across first assembly and rework; return requests and short payments are handled when somebody notices them.

Solution

Robots assemble the claim from the closed order, the photographs and the protocol, check it against the brand's rejection rules in a Microsoft List and submit it; responses are polled, rejections and return requests become tasks in Microsoft Teams, unpaid claims are aged and chased.

Potential outcome

First submissions leave the day after the order closes, rework shrinks to the cases the importer genuinely disputes, and the receivable is aged by claim rather than by statement. Illustrative arithmetic, not a client result.

Proposed solution

A repair order closing as warranty or campaign in the DMS is the trigger. A robot reads it: VIN, mileage, complaint, diagnosis text, labour lines with codes and times, parts lines, campaign code if any. It collects the photographs the technician dropped into the order's folder on SharePoint and the tester's PDF protocol, which UiPath Document Understanding reads with a model trained on your layouts; a field below the confidence threshold goes to Validation Station. Nothing is diagnosed by software; the claim carries what the technician and the adviser recorded.

The rules that cause rejections sit per brand in a Microsoft List owned by the warranty office: which operations need a part-number photograph, when the causal part must be on the parts lines, mileage and age limits, the authorisation threshold, how long the replaced part is held, which portal fields are mandatory. A claim that passes is submitted through the portal under a named robot user, or by file upload where offered; one that fails a rule stops as a task in UiPath Action Center, surfaced in Teams, naming the rule and the missing item.

The robot then polls each portal twice a day: a rejection becomes a task with the importer's reason and the field it points to, a return request a task for the parts desk with the deadline. The paid statement is matched line by line; short payments and debits become tasks. Power BI, as a tab in Teams, shows claims by age, rejection reasons by brand and workshop, and open return deadlines.

Native capabilities used

UiPath Orchestrator queues, time triggers, credential store and run log; UiPath Document Understanding with Validation Station; UiPath Action Center tasks with actionable notifications in Microsoft Teams; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; Microsoft Lists version history; Power BI as a tab in Teams

What we build

Claim assembly, photograph and protocol intake, rule rows and checks per brand, submission and polling per portal, the tasks in Teams, statement matching, the ageing and the Power BI view

Custom integration

Each brand's DMS by export, database view or UI automation, agreed per system; each importer portal by UI automation under a named robot user, or file upload where offered; the accounting system for the warranty receivable

How the automated process works

  1. AutomationA warranty or campaign order closing in the DMS creates a queue item in Orchestrator; the robot reads the header, the lines and the diagnosis text
  2. AutomationPhotographs and the diagnostic protocol are collected from the order's folder on SharePoint and read; a missing photograph is flagged at once
  3. SystemThe draft is checked against the brand's rule rows: codes, standard times, causal part, mileage and age limits, authorisation, attachments
  4. PersonA draft that fails a rule reaches the site's administrator as a task in Teams, naming the rule and the missing item; she corrects, asks the technician, or overrides with a reason
  5. AutomationPassing claims are submitted; the claim number is written back and the evidence pack is filed with an index
  6. AutomationTwice a day the robot polls each portal: rejections and return requests become tasks with the reason, the field or the deadline; statements are matched line by line
  7. PersonThe administrator decides each rejection and short payment: resubmit, appeal, or write off with a reason; the parts desk confirms each return with a consignment reference
AutomationSystemPerson

Human-in-the-loop model

Automation handles

  • Assembly of every claim from the order, the photographs and the protocol, and the rule checks
  • Submission, claim numbers written back, evidence packs filed, polling of every portal
  • Ageing of unpaid claims and return deadlines; line-by-line matching of statements

People decide

  • Whether a repair is warranty, goodwill or chargeable; the diagnosis and the coding are never altered by the robot
  • Every rejection and short payment: resubmit, appeal, or write off with a reason
  • The rule rows per brand, each with an owner and a validity date, and any override on a claim

Before and after

BeforeAfter
Repair close to first submissiontwo to five days, in batchesnext working day
Claims coming back on first submissionmodelled 16%rule failures stopped first; only disputed cases return
Rejections and return requestsa status list, when somebody checksa task in Teams with reason and deadline, the same day
Unpaid claimsworkbook at month-endaged by claim in Power BI, short payments queued on the day

Systems and integrations

The stack is deliberately short: one engine, one execution layer, one place where a person decides.

Inputs

  • each brand's DMS (closed warranty and campaign orders)
  • photographs and protocols in the order folder on SharePoint
  • rule rows in Microsoft Lists
  • status pages and statements of each importer portal

Automation layer

  • UiPath Orchestrator
  • UiPath Robots
  • UiPath Document Understanding
  • UiPath Integration Service
  • UiPath Action Center

Target systems

  • claim entry in each importer portal
  • claim numbers and statuses written back to the DMS
  • evidence packs on SharePoint
  • the Power BI semantic model

Human touchpoints: Action Center tasks in Teams for rule failures, rejections, returns and short payments; a warranty channel per site in Teams; the Power BI ageing view

each brand's DMSUiPath OrchestratorUiPath Robotsclaim entry in each importer portalAction Center tasks in Teams for rule failures

Technologies used

UiPath Robots + Orchestrator

claim assembly and checks, submission, polling, matching; queues, time triggers, credential store, run log

A
UiPath Document Understanding (IXP)

reads the diagnostic protocol with a model trained on your layouts; low-confidence fields go to Validation Station

A
UiPath Action Center in Microsoft Teams

rule failures, rejections, return requests and short payments as tasks with due dates, in Teams

A
UiPath Integration Service (Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint connectors)

photograph and protocol intake, evidence packs, rule rows, notifications

A
Microsoft Lists and SharePoint libraries

rule table per brand with version history; evidence pack per claim

A
Power BI

ageing, rejection reasons by brand and workshop, open return deadlines; a tab in Teams

A
The DMS of each brand and the importer warranty portals

orders and lines; claim entry, statuses, statements; by export, database view or UI automation

C
Averified product capability (vendor documentation)Cillustrative model — the figures on this page

Illustrative economic model

Numbers you can check against your own data.

Illustrative model
1,350 claims a month × 18 minutes of assembly and rework= 405 h / month
405 h × €24 fully loaded hourly cost= €9,720 / month
× 12 months≈ €116,640 / year
Annual warranty-office capacity released (illustrative)≈ €116,640

Two passes are priced here, not one: thirteen minutes of first assembly on every claim plus half an hour of correction on the modelled 16% that come back, blended to 18 minutes across all 1,350; €24 is a fully loaded hourly cost of a warranty administrator in Poland. Parts, labour and claim values stay out; nothing was measured at a client.

Run the numbers on your data

hours released per month
of annual capacity released

An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.

Business benefits

  • Claims leave the day after the order closes with the same evidence every time, so first submissions stop failing on a missing photograph or a mistyped code
  • Rework shrinks to the cases the importer genuinely disputes; the administrator's day moves from retyping to deciding
  • Every rejection is a task with a reason, an owner and a due date; nothing waits for somebody to open a status list
  • Return requests reach the parts desk the day they appear, so parts go back before the deadline and paid claims stop turning into debits
  • Statements are matched line by line; short payments are queried inside the importer's window, not booked as adjustments

The management view

  • Warranty income becomes a managed receivable: submitted, accepted, paid and disputed, by brand, workshop and month
  • Rules are rows with an owner and a version, so a change announced in March is applied in March at all nine workshops
  • Rejection reasons by workshop show where a habit needs changing; the technician who forgot the photograph hears about it while the part is still on the shelf

Board-level KPIs

first-time acceptance ratedays from repair close to submissiondays from submission to paymentwarranty receivable older than 60 daysparts returned before the deadline

Security and governance

Trust in automation is built on the audit trail, not on a promise.

  • Each portal is entered under a named robot user with claim-entry rights only and each DMS read under a read-only account; passwords are held in Orchestrator's credential store or in Azure Key Vault
  • Whoever edits a brand's rule rows cannot override a rule failure on a claim; every submission names the rule version it was checked against, and Microsoft Lists keeps the history
  • Claims carry the VIN, mileage and sometimes a customer name, so evidence packs are readable by the warranty office and finance only, in the group's Microsoft 365 tenant, with retention set in Microsoft Purview
  • Robots run from the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud with a run log of every claim read, submitted, polled and matched; the only model in the flow reads diagnostic protocols, trained on your documents, and every field below threshold is validated by a person

Why now

01

Manufacturers audit paid claims and debit what cannot be evidenced, and the cars entering their warranty years are the expensive ones to get wrong: 350.5 thousand new passenger cars registered in Poland in 2025 were not purely combustion-driven, 20% more than a year earlier (PZPM and KPMG, 3 February 2026), with protocol-heavy repairs, high-value parts and strict return rules

02

The modelled desk cost is about €9,720 a month, and it is the smaller part; each statement cycle a rejected claim adds is a month of financing the manufacturer's repair

03

Action Center tasks in Teams, custom Document Understanding models with Validation Station, SharePoint and Teams connectors, time triggers and credential stores are standard platform features; the build is rules and glue, not invention

Relevant executive roles

Aftersales Director

Warranty work is paid at the first submission, and the administrator's day goes to judgement rather than retyping

Group CFO

The warranty receivable is aged by claim, debits are seen the day they appear, and short payments are queried inside the importer's window

Site Director

Parts returns, authorisations and rejections stop depending on one person being at her desk

Common questions and objections

The importer's portal changes every few months.

Assembly and rules are separate from the submission step, built and repaired per portal; a changed screen fails one step and reports itself as a task rather than submitting a broken claim. With a file upload or an interface, the screen never matters.

Our technicians will not photograph parts properly.

The robot does not fix that; it makes it visible while it can still be fixed: the task reaches the foreman while the part is on the return shelf, and the reasons per workshop appear in Power BI.

Warranty needs judgement; a robot will submit nonsense.

Nothing is diagnosed or coded by the robot; it assembles what the technician and adviser recorded and checks it against rules your administrator wrote, and whatever fails a rule becomes her task. The judgement stays; the retyping goes.

When this is not the right solution

  • A single-site dealer with a few dozen claims a month, where a trained administrator and a checklist cost less than a build
  • Workshops that do not record the diagnosis, the causal part and the photographs on the order; that discipline comes first
  • A brand whose importer forbids automated portal entry and offers no upload route; the case shrinks to assembly, checking and chasing

A question for the next management meeting

March's warranty repairs at our largest workshop: which has the importer paid, which did it send back and why, which parts do we still owe it, and can anyone answer without opening four portals?

Implementation approach

A scope without ambiguity, before anything is signed.

We deliver

  • One closed quarter of claims read end to end, by brand and workshop: submitted, rejected, paid, debited
  • The rule rows per brand, written with your administrators from that quarter's rejection reasons
  • Assembly, intake, the protocol model, submission and polling per importer, the tasks in Teams, matching and the Power BI view
  • A parallel run at one workshop, then rollout site by site with hypercare and a runbook for the warranty office

We need from you

  • One closed quarter of claims: portal exports with statuses and reasons, statements, the orders behind them
  • A robot user for each importer portal and read access to each DMS, on the route each allows
  • Your most experienced warranty administrator for two half-days per brand, and an owner for the rules in aftersales

Stages

Discovery

One closed quarter read claim by claim, rejection reasons by brand and workshop

Rules and build

Rule rows with your administrators, photograph intake with the workshops, then assembly, checks, submission, polling, tasks, matching, Power BI

Parallel run

One workshop for one month: robot drafts beside the administrator's own claims, every difference explained

Go-live

Site by site, the administrator approving every submission at first, later only rule failures; hypercare and rule tuning

Departmental. Effort follows the number of brands and portals, the route each system allows, and how consistently technicians record diagnoses and photographs.