Our risk management strategy has been to better understand our own products and marketsnow and in developmentso we can not only respond to the underwriters' concerns, but we can more clearly address our own concerns. At the end of the day, the risk is with the company.
You have to work at identifying and maintaining and keeping abreast of the risk because it's being done somewhere else. Whereas if you own your own manufacturing, you have much better control over your costs and products.
If that factory has a catastrophic event, where can they provide alternative manufacturing facilities? If they can't, then you're out of business because they're out of business.
Insurance underwriters are asking many more diverse questions regarding both individual risks from both a products standpoint and premises liability. And renewals are requiring more and more detail than ever before to support the types of questions they're asking.
That takes a part of your supply chain and puts it in control of somebody else. You might not know what's going on on a day-to-day basis, or week-to-week basis, and then you have to understand how they're handling risks at their factory.
