61% Faster Warranty Claim Resolution for Auto Dealers

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At a glance

 ·  61% faster warranty claim resolution (14 days down to 5.5 days)  ·  40% fewer claims-related support tickets  ·  $310K in annual administrative savings  ·  6-week rollout across the full dealer network

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Who they are

This dealer network runs 42 franchise locations across three states, representing multiple OEM brands and covering parts distribution, warranty administration, and service center support for tens of thousands of vehicles. If distribution and service operations at your dealer network still hinge on paper and phone calls, you'll recognize this starting point immediately.

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Why warranty claims were taking two weeks to close

Every warranty claim followed the same slow path: a dealer spotted a damaged or mismatched part, called the regional office, waited on a manual inspection request, then waited again for a corporate approver to sign off before a replacement or credit could go through. Closing a single claim took 14 days on average, and that delay showed up everywhere downstream.

Service bays sat idle waiting on parts stuck in dispute. The corporate support desk fielded a constant stream of status-check calls on top of an already heavy ticket queue. And because claims weren't tracked in one place, finance regularly found mismatches between the credit dealers expected and what actually posted to their accounts, a second front of disputes layered on top of the first.

The network had already tried a shared spreadsheet and a generic IT helpdesk tool to fix this. Neither connected to the dealer management system or the SAP ledger, so someone still had to manually cross-check part numbers, purchase orders, and credit balances by hand. Phone tag went down slightly. The actual bottleneck, manual verification, never went away.

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Building automated warranty claims approval workflows on top of SAP and DMS

The network selected Interwork's Dealer Experience & Support Orchestration Platform specifically because it was designed to sit on top of the existing SAP and DMS environment rather than beside it. The rollout centered on automated warranty claims approval workflows and DMS SAP workflow automation, so claims, purchase orders, and credit data could stay synchronized without anyone manually reconciling three separate systems.

Implementation ran across six weeks:

1. Weeks 1-2, Discovery and data mapping. Interwork mapped the network's part catalog, PO structure, and credit hierarchy against the platform's claims schema, flagging superseded part numbers as the biggest source of existing confusion.
2. Weeks 2-4, SAP/DMS integration. Bidirectional connections linked the corporate SAP instance to each dealer's DMS, so a claim logged at the dealership updates the ledger in real time and vice versa. This is DMS SAP workflow automation in its purest form: no manual sync step anywhere in the loop.
3. Week 4, Claims workflow configuration. The claims module was configured so dealers could log a claim with photos directly at the point of delivery, attaching a digitized Goods Received Note (GRN) instead of a paper form, and routing automatically to the right approver based on claim type and value.
4. Week 5, Pilot. Five dealerships ran the new flow in parallel with the old paper process to validate accuracy before full cutover.
5. Week 6, Network-wide rollout. All 42 locations went live, with an SLA-based escalation matrix handling any claim that needed manual review, and no claim allowed to sit past its deadline without an owner attached.

No new hardware was needed anywhere in the network. This is the kind of dealer networks optimization that succeeds specifically because it removes friction rather than adding process on top of it.

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What changed

Billing disputes over credit mismatches dropped sharply once purchase orders and credit balances stayed synchronized in real time. Dealers also began using the self-service portal for routine part and pricing lookups they previously called in for, a big part of why ticket volume fell faster than the claims team expected. A well-designed SLA-based escalation matrix does more than resolve disputes faster, it removes the reason to call in the first place.

Talk to our team about automating your claims workflow →

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In their words

"We used to have a person whose entire week was reconciling claims against the SAP ledger by hand. Now that reconciliation happens the moment a dealer logs the claim. The bigger shift wasn't the software, it was that our dealers stopped calling us to ask where things stood."

Director of Dealer Operations, Regional Auto Dealer Network

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Would this work for your network?

How does this scale for a smaller dealer footprint? The SAP/DMS integration and claims workflow configuration are the fixed cost. A 10-location network typically sees a 3-4 week rollout, since there's less data mapping and fewer pilot locations to coordinate, and dealer networks optimization work tends to compress well once the first rollout has been proven.

What if we're not on SAP? The platform supports bidirectional integration across major ERP and DMS combinations, not just SAP. Discovery is where that mapping gets scoped for your specific stack.

What would you change if you started over? Run the pilot at the dealer with the messiest existing claim backlog, not the cleanest one. It's the fastest way to stress-test the workflow, and the digitized Goods Received Note (GRN) step specifically, before full rollout.

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See how this could work for your dealer network

If manual sign-offs and disconnected systems are slowing down your claims process, let's map out what automation could look like across your network.

Book a free consultation with our automotive software specialists →