Royal Cosun, a multinational agri-industrial group, produces food ingredients and products for the food industry, foodservice sector, and retail distribution, as well as for animal feed and non-food applications, such as biogas. Established as a cooperative nearly 120 years ago by Dutch sugar beet growers, Royal Cosun now has some 8,800 member/shareholders, 3,900 employees and annual revenues of €2 billion.

Jeroen Helders, group treasurer and insurance risk manager responsible for financial processes and financial risk management, leads Royal Cosun’s initiative to strengthen its risk and insurance program,  drive efficiencies and implement an enterprise risk management framework.

In 2017, he and his risk management team collaborated with Origami Risk’s UK team to design and implement several new technology-based capabilities, including a tool to capture and analyze critical underwriting, performance and safety data from the company’s multinational operations.

Using Origami’s platform, Royal Cosun’s risk management was quickly able to capture construction, value and loss data for all of the company’s 25 production facilities in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, China and U.S., as well as more than 150 additional storage and vendor facilities spread throughout those countries.

They now maintain and have ready access to all insurable values for each location, as well as location-specific building and civil code information, building materials and construction data, combustible and non-combustible inventory, sprinkler and fire and risk protection information.

In Origami, Royal Cosun also captures revenues for each operation, which is critical for procuring business interruption coverage and related insurance claim recoveries; inventory data required for working materials coverage; and employee travel for business travel insurance and collective accident insurance. The ability to track this information by location also facilitates premium cost allocation and local administration of safety and loss control.

Further, Origami enables Royal Cosun’s risk management team to consolidate all their risk-related information in a single data base and to distribute and share discrete data for each operation with senior leadership. They can also deliver timely and accurate underwriting submissions to their insurance company providers. With ready access to this data, Royal Cosun’s property insurers can underwrite the risk with greater precision, resulting in reduced premium costs.

Launching operational audits. This year, Royal Cosun began rolling out Origami’s risk self-assessment and auditing tools to track maintenance and repair schedules, requirements, and results for each location. For instance, semi-annually, an individual responsible for electrical engineering at a Royal Cosun facility will complete a brief self-audit by responding to 10 - 15 online questions in Origami to identify potential issues and to validate that the engineering and operations teams are adhering to Royal Cosun’s established global maintenance and safety standards.

The process enables team leaders and operations managers to spot potential issues and address them quickly, eliminating the need for internal meetings that could delay implementation of corrective measures. While there is still central oversight, the process delegates responsibility to team members at each location to ensure their operations comply with company standards.

Precise cost allocation. The maintenance and safety data gathered in Origami enable Royal Cosun’s risk management team to assign risk ratings to individual locations and functions that can be compared with company-wide metrics and used to develop a pathway for making improvements at each location. These details, in turn, are shared with insurers, which factor them into their underwriting. Royal Cosun’s team also uses the results to allocate premium costs to individual locations.

Besides enhancements to Royal Cosun’s global safety and maintenance processes, the results include:

• Efficient underwriting and global risk management process. Because Royal Cosun now has the ability to capture and instantly disseminate critical building, value, contents, inventory and loss control information, its insurers can develop a more effective insurance program structure with appropriate coverage limits, deductibles, and premium credits for effective maintenance and other loss-control measures. This has resulted in significant premium savings and helped facilitate a continuous improvement process involving all Royal Cosun’s production operations, storage and vendor facilities.
• More effective utilization of insurance brokerage services. Royal Cosun has been able to reevaluate how it uses its broker to focus more on value-added activities that will support and advance various elements of its enterprise risk management initiative.
• Enhanced insurance program structure and administration. Royal Cosun now maintains all of its global insurance policies within Origami, enabling Jeroen Helders’ team to assess coverages and spot coverage overlaps or gaps with stand-alone domestic policies required by individual countries. This has helped facilitate more seamless integration of all policies into Royal Cosun’s global insurance program. Origami has also enabled Royal Cosun to streamline its premium payment process and generate payments for self-insured losses to claimants.
• Real-time internal reporting. Using Origami’s robust data and analytics capabilities, Royal Cosun’s risk management team generates detailed reports on exposure and loss analysis, and the impact of safety and loss control initiatives for leadership and operations by insurance product line, location, function and region. This enables the company to pilot process improvements in one location, evaluate results, make refinements, and subsequently roll them out efficiently to multiple locations.
• Strengthened compliance with GDPR. Royal Cosun has taken advantage of special features in Origami to limit access to personal claims data, which has helped bring their information management practices in line with new requirements for protecting the security of personal data stipulated under GDPR.

More recently, Royal Cosun began leveraging Origami’s ability to capture value information, current and historical loss data, construction, safety and exposure information to help drive decisions on risk retention, transfer and mitigation enterprise-wide, as well as within specific coverage lines and by location. Meanwhile, claims data captured in Origami reveal higher claim costs at specific locations, enabling risk management to prioritize where allocating resources for safety and claims management could yield the greatest impact. Thus, Royal Cosun’s collaboration with Origami continues uncovering  opportunities to reduce their total cost of risk.