365 SERVICES

A DOT on-site audit evaluates a company's safety performance and confirms proper and complete record-keeping. The review also determines if the company has adequate management controls in place to ensure FMCSR compliance. We make sure our insureds are prepared to respond to anything an auditor throws at them.

Continuous MVR monitoring goes a step ahead of simply pulling MVRs at one point in time. We monitor behavior in real time, so it can be addressed as soon as possible. Customers who employ drivers with serious moving violations perform, on average, more than 20 points worse in loss ratio results than customers whose employees have clean driving records.

Underwriting cyber risk is hard. The threats are diverse and complicated – ranging from phishing and ransomware attempts to denial-of-service attacks and cloud-service interruptions – and they continue to multiply and evolve. We help insureds to realize what they are exposed to and then suggest the correct coverage to protect their businesses.

Insurtech refers to using technology innovations to squeeze out savings and efficiency from the current insurance industry model (ex: telematics, fleet cameras, plugins, etc.). Innovative products are coming out every day that help companies mitigate their risk. We help to assess the products that are really making a difference so that our customers can achieve best-in-class insurance programs and save on insurance costs.

We help build a comprehensive management program designed to manage safety elements in the workplace. It includes policy, objectives, plans, procedures, organization, responsibilities and other measures. A good safety program leads to better losses and good loss history leads to lower overall cost of insurance.

Scripting the right story about your business is very important. If all an underwriter is looking at is your ACORD applications (insurance forms that are used to market your business, but are very boring and hard to read) and your loss runs, then you might not come off as a great risk. We work with you to highlight specific safety programs, outline potential growth and emphasize ownerships commitment to safety. We also address and explain your side of large losses since the brief description on the loss runs does not always tell your side of the story.

The insured who has prepared for the possibility of an OSHA inspection will find the inspection far less disruptive than the employer who has never given an inspection any thought or who claims “it will never happen here”. OSHA fines can be costly and range from $12,000 for first-time violations to $120,000 for repeat offenders. We want to make sure our insureds are not subject to these costly penalties.

Assessment of current claims to make sure they are being handled correctly and closed out in a timely manner is very important. Insurance companies are handling hundreds of thousands of claims on a daily basis. Oftentimes, things are overlooked or handled incorrectly. We perform claims reviews at different points throughout the policy period, helping catch any potential mistakes and keeping insurance premiums from being inflated.

This report is a snapshot which provides a concise record of a company's fleet size, cargo type, DOT inspections, out-of-service units, crash data and safety rating. Clean SAFER reports help to control insurance pricing. If a business is looked upon more favorably by underwriters, it results in superior insurance pricing. We have found that these reports are one of the main things underwriters are looking at when investigating businesses with an auto exposure. Also, these are the first reports that will be pulled by attorneys if there is a claim. If they can prove negligence via a SAFER report, it can substantially increase the cost of claims, which in-turn drive up insurance premiums upon renewal. Because these reports are available on the internet for anyone to pull, the information in them can be dangerous. We pull them at several points throughout the policy period, identify trends, then help the insureds to improve those trends to clean up the report.

Simply put, this is a program to allow workers, who are unable to perform their usual and customary job duties due to an injury, to return to work in a temporary, limited, or light-duty capacity while they recover. The costs associated with disability due to work-related injuries can be huge! When we help a business implement this program, an employer can proactively manage those costs by keeping injured employees engaged and working productively while they recover.

Depending on the type and size of a risk, Lumber Insurance Services will approach several companies to make sure our quote is in line with the current marketplace. We then create a document that reflects the feedback and pricing of the companies we approach and present the findings at the time of renewal. While we don't like to move our insureds to different carriers every year, it is important to check the companies to make sure they are still competitive. We also use competing quotes to leverage pricing, which results in a lower overall cost of insurance for our insureds.

A fleet safety program establishes the policies and procedures that are needed to help ensure a safe work environment for employees and others on the road. For companies with a fleet of vehicles of any size, we help implement a formal fleet safety plan can provide a number of advantages, including improved safety, improved insurance costs and the potential to improve fleet efficiency.

This service allows you to see how your premiums and exposures change from year to year. It gives you a transparent snapshot of your insurance pricing and why it changes from one renewal to the next.

By helping insureds develop a plan of action for when large losses occur, they are prepared when the unthinkable happens. You want to have a plan of attack in place to move forward and get back to business.

Business websites contain a lot of information, sometimes too much. We assess business websites through the eyes of an insurance underwriter and make suggestions on how information may be interpreted—both good and bad. The website is the first thing an underwriter is going to look at and there are a lot of things you can do to improve your perception.

Insurance certificates are provided to customers and vendors to prove that the correct coverage is in place. Annual analysis of the certificates that are provided is suggested in order to prevent extending unnecessary coverage to third parties that either don’t need the coverage or no longer need the coverage. We constantly see insureds providing unnecessary extensions of their coverage and then get tied up in "shotgun suits" and sued. By properly vetting certificates for our insureds, we are able to prevent in unnecessary litigation that leads to increased insurance costs at renewal.