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01/09/2011
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Tim Davis is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and senior member of the American Society for Quality and an honorary professor at Bradford and Warwick universities.
 Warranty claims are an untapped source of data that can be fed back through the manufacturers and supply chain to designers and engineers.
Greater reliability, with reduced costs for vehicle manufacturers and component suppliers are achievable without massive investment, says Tim Davis, who has been analysing breakdowns and quality in the car industry for more than a quarter of a century.
He is passionate about statistics and analysis, using data to discover where any weaknesses lie and how they could be removed before a vehicle or component even goes into production, effectively designing and engineering-out problems before manufacture.
Warranty claims give feedback on actual failures, but they can contain much more useful data, if the correct analysis is carried out and this information is passed back to engineers and designers throughout the supply chain.
Just such careful analysis is now day-to-day work for We Predict, started by former City of London insurance industry actuary James Davies, who developed the idea of applying established actuarial techniques to automotive OEM warranty prediction and who met Tim Davis when he was with JLR.
Davis is an advisor to We Predict, which over two years has been monitoring five million new vehicles and adds over 700,000 annually to its patented Indico analytics programme, capable of collating and monitoring enormous amounts of vehicle, service and warranty data in real time to identify current and future liability and failure rates around the world.
"You can get all sorts of insights from the warranty claims," says Davis. "They contain details of mileage, but you can also look at where the vehicles have been used, how they have been driven in particular environments, their service history, work done on them and what has been replaced either routinely or for other reasons."
He comments that such detailed analysis could indicate if there were problems with particular components, the way they were originally fitted or replaced, if the service was correctly done, if the appropriate material was originally specified and whether or not there was a flaw in the design, which created the likelihood of failure in future. Theoretical situations could also be developed, based on data to predict events with regard to claims.
"In my experience, 70% of quality problems are not a direct result of the way a car is built, but in the way the parts are designed and, with 3,000 components in a typical vehicle, that is a big potential problem waiting to happen."
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