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In our last two articles of this three-part series, we provided various global factors that are contributing to the current crane insurance market disruption. This final article edition will focus on bringing breakthrough data intelligence solutions into the equation to improve risk factors in our industry to help with today’s crane insurance market situation, all while improving customer safety.
Historically, when insurance markets get challenging, rates go up, available insurance markets (to offer competitive bids) shrink and the amount of policy limit (capacity) available is materially reduced. The common outcome is that crane insurance buyers take larger retentions (SIR/Deductibles) to reduce the level of premium rate increases and to maintain their amount of coverage limits available for purchase.
Improving risk factors correlates to safety, and it better positions your company to obtain optimal insurance terms in whatever type of insurance market exists. More importantly, from this writer’s perspective, improving risk factors reduces fatality exposure to your workforce and the general public. Insurance markets come and go, rates go up and down, available capacity grows and shrinks — however, every man or woman that comes to work, should be able to return home unscathed at the end of the day the way they came to work.
This risk improvement rationale is why the Federation for Crane Risk Improvement (FCRI) was formed as an innovative risk information exchange platform in 2021 by a group of highly recognized crane industry professionals, including a crane owner/operator, a professional crane engineer and a seasoned crane risk management professional. FCRI represents innovation at its finest through the creation of a proprietary risk intelligence sharing platform. FCRI’s central purpose entails obtaining and sharing safety insights from crane operations all across North America using a one-of-a-kind crane accident causation database as foundational intelligence to provide safety facts to customers. This unique risk intelligence sharing platform represents Next Generation Risk Management with the expressed intention to measurably reduce fatality results as our primary objective in our industry.
Data is powerful, and shared data is even more powerful and can make a material difference in improving risk factors in crane operations across the country.
Different perspectives with different risk conditions in a secure and confidential intelligence sharing platform environment that utilizes strictly anonymized information provides true data intelligence to improve risk conditions. Real-time access to data, streaming and analytics are priorities in every industry today. Because of the recognized power in data-driven decision making and its potentially game-changing innovation, crane owners can obtain seamless access to their operating data to compare with their industry peers to continually improve safety performance.
Laying the Foundation for Using Data & AI Via the Federation
Crane industry adoption of AI is ready to shift into higher gear. The capabilities of generative AI have captured the attention of most management teams in our industry. Many are moving quickly to better understand how to deploy or experiment with it in their operations. There is a general consensus growing that AI can improve the operating efficiency in the crane insurance procurement process, and that will eventually equate to obtaining better terms. This is especially prevalent in today’s cumbersome insurance data management process considering the large amount of recurring documentation required by insurers each year. This massive recurring data requirement process includes vast equipment schedules, payrolls by job category, sales by project type, fleet serial numbers and maintenance records, safety policy information and training records, certifications etc. All of which can be simplified with AI.
The emergence of generative AI can enhance productivity for crane owners/operators through having an additional set of risk information management tools at their disposal to simplify their annual insurance purchasing requirements. The FCRI data intelligence from the risk information exchange platform is designed to contribute to accident causation analytics to enhance safety, which will ultimately impact their insurance terms.
According to a recent general industry survey by MIT, company priorities are: streaming data workloads for real-time analytics (cited 72%), having a fundamental capability for many applications with the ability to adopt emerging technologies (66%), the ability to securely share data across various platforms (64%) and single governance model for sharing data (60%).
Federation Risk Survey Tools
The FCRI has recently established an innovative risk survey tool to counter the tsunami of use cases and proofs of concepts flooding the market from all directions and at a pace that is probably far greater than past emerging tech trends.
An additional objective for introducing the Federation Risk Survey Model is for when we consider that AI’s rising popularity provides another reason to exercise greater discipline with the urgency factor for project prioritization.
Conclusion
The generative AI wave in deployment of data intelligence is a global phenomenon — not just a Silicon Valley matter. Companies across the world are investing in, and experimenting with, technology, seeking to gain competitive advantage. This growing dynamic should have an impact on improving crane insurance market conditions.
Using technology to empower people to innovate and create value is the main objective of using AI with data to accelerate change for business improvement. However, people also augment technology, making technology and people decisions closely intertwined.
The stakes involved in these decisions are rising due to the infrastructure demands that these advances in AI pose today in all business environments beyond the insurance marketplace. Technology experts predict it will unleash a new wave of overall market productivity and potentially add trillions of dollars of new value across all industries.
