Manufacturing excess casualty: products liability & plant exposure

Manufacturing excess is products-driven: sales and payroll by class, a handful of plants, and a loss picture split between products-completed-operations claims and plant injuries. Over a $50M lead umbrella, the products tail is the story. We ran a real precision manufacturer, Meridian Precision Products, through InsightXtract.

Why manufacturing is an excess casualty risk

A manufacturer's excess sits over primary GL with a large products-completed-operations exposure — a component that fails in the field, years after it shipped, is exactly what the umbrella is bought for. Class of product, sales by class, export share and the completed-ops tail drive the rate; the plant WC book rides alongside.

The submission packet

A real manufacturing placement is rarely one clean file. This one is five, in four different shapes — the everyday reality an underwriting team has to re-key by hand today:

• broker_email.pdf — the renewal narrative: account description, requested limits, exposure snapshot, and the excess-layer options to quote.
• rfq.pdf — the umbrella/excess application: general information, coverage requested, and the exposure bases.
• exposure_workbook.xlsx — the heart of the file: GL exposure by products class code, a plant/location schedule, WC payroll by class across the shops, and a named-insured schedule of subsidiaries.
• loss_run.pdf — five years of currently-valued losses, split between products-liability claims and plant workers-comp.
• schedule_of_underlying.pdf — the primary casualty and lead umbrella the excess attaches over.

Step 1 — Classification

Every file is routed to a document type first — evidence-bearing, with a confidence, not a black-box label:

Step 2 — Coverage structure, with citations

The requested tower is read from the email and application, every value grounded to its page:

Coverage	Requested	Source
General Liability — each occurrence	$1,000,000	rfq p.2
General Aggregate	$2,000,000	rfq p.2
Products / Completed-Ops Aggregate	$2,000,000	rfq p.2
Commercial Auto — CSL	$1,000,000	rfq p.3
Employers Liability	$1,000,000	rfq p.3
Lead Umbrella	$50M	email p.1

Step 3 — Exposure schedules, typed & normalized

The workbook is where template OCR falls over — many sheets, hundreds of rows, broker-specific wording. InsightXtract reads every sheet, maps each to a typed schedule, and normalizes the codes against governed glossaries. A slice of the GL exposure schedule:

State	WC Code	Description	Revenue	Payroll
IN us_state_codes	51862 ncci	Machined metal products mfg	$21,400,000	$3,852,000
OH us_state_codes	59005 ncci	Plastic injection molding	$14,900,000	$2,682,000
MI us_state_codes	51315 ncci	Metal stamping	$11,200,000	$2,016,000
… 46 GL rows · workers_compensation 60 · named_insured_mix 22 · location_list 14

Column bindings: state → us_state_codes, class → ncci_wc_class_codes / iso_gl_class_codes, occupancy → occupancy_types. Out-of-vocabulary values are flagged by validation, not silently kept — and fuzzy column resolution means a rule written for payroll still binds a broker’s “Total Payroll” column.

Step 4 — Derived exposures (deterministic, not guessed)

The account is rated on totals. Rather than ask a model to eyeball-sum hundreds of rows, the document type declares deterministic sum / count / group_by rules that reduce the extracted schedules exactly — the same numbers every run, each traceable to its source table:

Step 5 — The loss run

A manufacturer's loss run mixes products-completed-operations claims (component failure, defect) with plant WC — machine injuries, chemical exposure, lifting. Every claim is extracted — coverage line, status and cause normalized — and rolled up, with a by-line split for the loss pick:

Claim #	Coverage	Cause	Status	Incurred
MER-4109	GL coverage_lines	Products - component failure	Open claim_statuses	$412,000
MER-4088	GL coverage_lines	Products - defect claim	Closed claim_statuses	$188,000
MER-4051	WC coverage_lines	Machine amputation	Open claim_statuses	$305,000
… 27 claims across 5 policy years, currently valued

What the underwriter reads first

The coded record surfaces exactly the drivers that move this class of business:

• Sales by products class — the rating basis, and where the completed-ops tail concentrates.
• Export share & product-recall program, captured from the supplemental.
• Plant WC severity — machine and chemical exposures by location.
• Products loss development over five valued years, coded by line.

Why it holds up in production

• Every value is cited — page/region provenance on fields and schedules; a file review can click any number to its source.
• Codes are normalized against governed glossaries; out-of-vocabulary values are validated, not hidden.
• Totals are computed, not guessed — deterministic derived fields over the extracted rows, exact and reproducible.
• Configuration is versioned — document types, glossaries and rules pinned to a published version, so an output made today reproduces tomorrow.
• Nothing is dropped — the all-sheets extractor surfaces every schedule, even ones the base schema didn’t anticipate.