Case Study · Forward Deployed Engineering
Forward Deployed Engineering: Clearing a Warranty Claims Backlog
An Adivi engineer embedded with a manufacturer's warranty, quality and IT teams found the real bottleneck, then built, integrated and ran an AI claims-triage system in the client's existing tools.
The stated ask vs. the real problem
The client asked for a dashboard to track a growing warranty claims backlog. After a week sitting with claims analysts, our engineer found a different problem. Dealers wrote claims as free-text narratives with photos, in mixed languages and shorthand, and analysts spent most of their time manually coding them into failure codes and part numbers. Duplicate and suspicious claims were only caught by chance, and emerging quality issues surfaced weeks late.
A dashboard would have shown the backlog. It would not have reduced it.
How the engagement ran
Embed
The engineer worked alongside warranty analysts, quality engineers and the ERP team, shadowing real claims and mapping every hand-off.
Identify
Measured where the time actually went and agreed with the business owner that claim coding and triage, not reporting, was the bottleneck.
Design
Proposed an LLM that extracts failure mode, component and part numbers from each narrative, an anomaly model that flags likely duplicates and suspicious claims, and a queue that prioritises claims by value and risk.
Build on real data
Built a working prototype on the client's historical claims within weeks and validated its codes against analysts' decisions before going further.
Integrate
Put suggestions inside the existing claims screen in the ERP, using single sign-on, role permissions and a full audit trail. Analysts didn't need to learn a new tool.
Iterate
Held weekly sessions with analysts to fix real edge cases, such as dealer abbreviations, multilingual narratives and ambiguous parts, and tuned confidence thresholds for automatic suggestions versus manual review.
Deploy and operate
Rolled out in phases by region, with monitoring, alerting, runbooks and training. Emerging-defect signals now feed the quality engineering team every week.
Why this is Forward Deployed Engineering
- The engineer owned the business outcome, not just a model or a ticket.
- Discovery changed the scope, and the client ended up with the solution they needed, not the one they first asked for.
- The solution runs inside the client's own systems, security model and daily workflow.
- Real-world feedback shaped every release until the system was stable, trusted and part of day-to-day operations.
KPIs we design for
Technology
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