For roofing manufacturers, warranty costs are not just a line item - they are a structural drain on margins.
Across manufacturing, warranty expenses consume 0.5% to 7% of annual revenue, exceeding $50 billion globally each year. In the U.S. alone, more than $23 billion is spent processing warranty claims.
Yet despite decades of investment in ERP, CRM, and service platforms, warranty costs continue to rise.
Why?
Because most warranty systems are built to manage claims, not products.
They track paperwork efficiently - but they fail to surface what actually matters:
which roofing products are failing, where, why, and under what conditions.
In roofing, failures are rarely random.
They are driven by:
Yet in traditional warranty systems, these signals remain buried in free-text claims and service notes.
We see this repeatedly in the field: a particular membrane batch begins failing in high-humidity regions. Contractors notice the pattern within weeks. But in a claims-centric system, that insight takes 6 to 9 months to reach quality or engineering teams.
By then, tens of thousands of additional units have already been installed.
This is not a workflow problem.
It’s an intelligence gap.
Roofing manufacturers that shift from claims-centric systems to product-centric warranty intelligence consistently see:
Over the past decade, warranty teams focused on speed - processing claims faster, closing tickets sooner, and reducing administrative friction.
But faster claims processing does nothing to stop defective shingles, membranes, or components from continuing to ship.
This is the Transactional Trap:
optimizing the movement of bad information instead of eliminating the root cause.
In roofing, where environmental exposure amplifies small defects into large losses, this trap is especially costly.
Product-centric warranty management flips the model.
Instead of organizing everything around the claim, the system organizes around the product unit itself - from factory to roof to repair.
|
Feature |
Legacy Warranty Systems |
Product-Centric Model (iWarranty) |
|
Primary Focus |
The claim |
The roofing product lifecycle |
|
System of Record |
Customer & ticket |
Unit-level digital twin |
|
Failure Visibility |
Post-failure |
Early pattern detection |
|
Data Access |
Service team only |
Quality, engineering, supply chain |
|
Response |
Reactive |
Predictive & preventive |
|
Cost Reduction |
Volume efficiency |
Failure prevention |
The result: fewer repeat failures, earlier interventions, and materially lower warranty exposure.
iWarranty provides a product-centric warranty intelligence layer purpose-built for manufacturers with complex, failure-sensitive products like roofing.
Each roofing unit is tracked as a digital twin, capturing:
Under the hood, this product-centric model is powered by autonomous AI agents-meaning the system doesn’t just report issues, it acts on them in real time, within defined business rules and audit controls.
Evidence for supplier-driven defects is automatically compiled, accelerating recovery and enforcement.
Ask: What would a 30–40% reduction in warranty costs do to margin and cash flow?
Track each unit’s full lifecycle - not just the claim outcome.
Automatically trigger quality holds and engineering alerts when patterns emerge.
Preventive action costs up to 10× less than field remediation.
Reward reductions in failure rates - not just claims throughput.
The most competitive manufacturers are those whose systems learn- and act -the fastest.
Every roofing warranty claim already contains the intelligence needed to build better products and avoid repeat failures.
The difference is whether your system is built to extract and act on that intelligence—or simply archive it.
Product-centric warranty management turns warranty from a blind spot into a strategic advantage.
Most roofing manufacturers believe they are operating efficiently - but are still reacting months too late.
👉 Click here Schedule a 15-Minute Warranty ROI Diagnostic call with our iWarranty team to identify your top three warranty cost drivers, the fastest path to a 30%+ reduction & product-centred warranty management.
About iWarranty
Our team combines expert consultants, technologists and lawyers from global firms such as PwC, McKinsey, Baker & McKenzie, DLA Piper, CMS, and Ropes and Gray who lead ground-breaking technology and legal transformation programmes for global multinational corporations. We bring deep subject matter expertise in operational transformation, product strategy, and enterprise-scale execution as well as a great people to partner and collaborate with.