WARRANTY WEEK - Goodman Featured on Extended Warranty Panel at WCM

Following is an excerpt from Warranty Week's February 28, 2007 report on the upcoming Warranty Chain Management conference. Full article available.

Extended Warranty Panel

Rachel Cater, the manager of the Extended Services Department at Goodman Global Inc., said she will be discussing extended warranties from a manufacturer's point of view. "I'll talk about it in general and then bring in some details about Goodman's presentation at the end," she said.

"Part of what I get out of the conference is all the different viewpoints," Cater said. "And I felt like based on what I had heard in the past with regard to extended warranties, I had a bit of a different perspective. And I wanted to share that."

Goodman Manufacturing Company, which until last year was a family-owned private company, is actually now the second-largest U.S.-based HVAC manufacturer, behind United Technologies' Carrier unit. It's also now a public company following a 2006 initial public offering of stock, and so now it's following all of the same warranty reporting requirements detailed earlier in the day by Stacy Ingram. In fact, on the day Cater spoke to Warranty Week, she was working on all the regulatory filings that are now part of her job responsibilities. "It can be a challenge," she said.

Goodman's products are sold and installed by a network of distribution centers, some of which are company-owned and some of which are independently-owned. As regarding knowing who its ultimate customers are, Cater said Goodman is now struggling with some of the same challenges experienced by manufacturers who go through retailers. Sales of extended service plans for which Goodman is the obligor is a splendid way to make that happen.

"We can offer the contract to the end user at a tremendous price," she said, by cutting out the middlemen and their markups. "We think it's a win-win for both us and for the consumer." She said Goodman looked at outsourcing the whole operation to a third party, but concluded it was better to keep it in-house. Most of its competitors have come to the opposite conclusion, preferring to work with third party administrators or insurance companies.