30/07/2026
Manufacturing Insurance: Why One Policy Is Never Enough
No two manufacturers carry the same risk profile. A precision engineering firm running CNC machinery faces fundamentally different exposures to a food producer operating on tight batch traceability requirements, or an aerospace subcontractor bound by AS9100 quality standards.
Yet manufacturing is routinely treated as a single insurance category, a single-page schedule with a few standard covers bolted on. For any business with real operational complexity, that approach creates gaps.
The right insurance programme starts with understanding how a business operates and not with selecting from a standard menu.
A properly structured manufacturing programme will typically address some or all the following, depending on the nature of the business:
• Material damage and business interruption, including machinery breakdown, reinstatement of specialist plant and supply chain interruption extensions
• Product liability with appropriate jurisdiction clauses, particularly critical for manufacturers supplying the US or EU markets post-product regulation changes
• Goods in transit and marine cargo, especially relevant where components are imported or finished goods are exported
• Cyber insurance because manufacturing is increasingly targeted; OT/IT convergence creates significant exposure in automated production environments
• Management liability, including Directors' and Officers' and Employment Practices Liability for businesses of any scale
• Trade credit insurance protecting receivables where customer concentration is high or supply relationships are cross-border
At Bridges, we spend time with manufacturing clients well before renewal because we know that understanding their operations, their supply chains and the markets they serve.
Because understanding the business always comes before recommending the insurance.
