Warranty pull-out whose IMEI isn’t in the sold list

The workflow

A customer returns a unit under warranty, the dealer passes it up to the distributor, and the IMEI on it is not in the list of units the distributor sold, so nobody can say whether it is a warranty case, a reporting gap, or a unit that was never the distributor’s to begin with.

What happens today

Grey-market phones circulate alongside the official channel: China-only models brought in by independent importers, cheaper, often sold without a BIR invoice and with only the seller’s warranty behind them. When one reaches a brand service center, it is refused. A unit refused at the service center comes back down the line to whoever sold it, and if a dealer sold it, the argument is with the distributor.

At the distributor the question is simple to ask and slow to answer: is this ours? The sell-in from the brand came with an IMEI list; the sell-out from the dealers came as stock cards in whatever format each dealer keeps; and the two live in different spreadsheets, kept by different people. Somebody searches both for the IMEI, does not find it, and the dealer is told no — or, because the dealer is a good dealer and the customer is standing at the counter, told yes, and the unit is replaced out of the distributor’s own stock with nothing written down.

The NTC has required phone dealers to hold no illegally acquired stock and to submit a monthly list of the IMEIs they hold since 2004, so a unit whose IMEI matches nothing is not only a warranty question. And every replacement handed over without a record is a unit of the distributor’s stock gone, with no entry to say why.

What ordinary rules handle

Most of this is a lookup and a decision table, and we build it as ordinary rules, because ordinary rules are cheaper to run, easy to check, and give the same answer for the same IMEI next month.

• Looking the IMEI up in the sell-in list from the brand and in every dealer’s reconciled sell-out, and returning found or not found from each.
• Checking the purchase date on the customer’s receipt against the warranty period, when there is a receipt.
• Sorting the clear cases — found in both lists under this dealer, or found in neither — and routing each to the person who handles it, with the lookups attached.
• Reminding the service center while an RMA is open, and holding the dealer’s claim open until it is answered.

Where the assistant follows through

This is the part we call follow-through: the assistant checks the records, prepares the action, routes it, chases the reply, and raises what it cannot settle.

What rules cannot do is decide what an IMEI that is in the sell-in list but in no dealer’s sell-out means: a unit sold and never reported, a unit moved between two dealers without anyone saying so, a demo unit that went home with somebody, or a stock card that was read wrong three months ago. AI reads the records around the gap — the dealer’s messages that week, the allocation, the card that did not mention it — and makes a call about where the unit most likely came from, and says how sure it is.

1. The return becomes a draft case. The IMEI on the box and the one on the unit’s own screen are read, the dealer’s message and the receipt photo are attached, and the case is opened as a draft, because nothing has been promised yet.
2. The IMEI is looked up in sell-in and sell-out. Found in both under this dealer: a warranty case. Found in neither: not the distributor’s unit. Found in one and not the other: the case that needs reading.
3. The channel of origin is worked out from what the records do say. For the case that needs reading, the records around the gap are read and a most-likely origin is written down with its reasons, so the next person to look at it is not reconstructing three months of stock cards.
4. The RMA or the refusal is drafted and routed. Drafted, not sent. The RMA goes towards the service center with the sell-in line and the sell-out line attached; the refusal goes back to the dealer with the two lookups that came up empty, in words the dealer can show the customer.
5. The reply is chased, and what the records cannot settle is escalated. The dealer is asked in its own thread for the receipt photo or the on-screen IMEI when either is missing, on a schedule, and the claim stays open until it is answered rather than forgotten in the thread. The case that needs reading, a dealer who disputes the refusal, or an IMEI that reads differently on the box and on the screen goes to the person who owns the dealer relationship, with the case as built so far.

Where a person decides

Replacing a unit the records say is not the distributor’s — as goodwill, to keep a dealer or a customer — is the sales manager’s call, and the assistant cannot take it. It builds the case up to that point and stops there — not because a check failed, but because that is where the line was drawn when the workflow was built.

A goodwill unit is stock leaving with no sale against it, and that is a decision. It is recorded against the IMEI, the dealer, and the name of the person who approved it. A quarter later, the question “how many units did we replace for this dealer that were never ours, and who agreed to it” has an answer — which is also the moment a run of grey units coming through one dealer stops being an anecdote.