Fraud detection in a warranty program for a French Car Manufacturer

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Initial problem: A French car manufacturer wanted to have better control of its warranty program and detect if there was any obvious fraud in the system.

Status at inception: Suspicions of abuse and fraud in the warranty program by management. The IT- Department could not quickly find a solution on how to compare reports from different markets with different languages and designations of car models and their spare parts.

Basic Solution: Categorize different car models by year as different concepts and thereafter assign all the different names in different languages to a concept, so that 1 car model and Year could be called as many different names as needed. Thereafter all the parts for each model needed to be done the same way. Once this was done a database was created and used. 

Reported findings: After being able to compare each model with its parts for all countries and dealers, one of the findings was that a specific dealer in Hungary stood out for reporting way too many battery warranty claims. The company later found that the dealer put in an old battery in all new cars and sold the new batteries that were delivered with the cars. Thereafter the customer claimed a warranty on the old battery and received a new battery.