Moon Insurance Managers, Inc.
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Moon Insurance Managers, Inc. · TDI license #5595

Manufacturers Insurance in Houston, TX

Insure what you make, what makes it, and what keeps it moving. Manufacturers insurance is not one standardized policy — it is a program assembled around a real operation, and the useful review follows that operation from raw material and work in process through to finished goods, delivery, and the product after it leaves your control.

Which is why the first conversation is not a list of policy names. It is three questions about how the place actually runs.

Start a manufacturing insurance review
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  • #5595TDI license

Three questions

Follow the operation from input to finished product

What do you make? The product
The product and its end use decide the product-harm conversation, shape the class an underwriter is looking at, and usually sit behind whatever a customer contract is demanding.
What makes it? The plant and the line
The building, the utilities, and the specific machines a normal production cycle cannot run without. Not the equipment list — the short list that matters.
What has to keep working? The dependencies
Suppliers, outside processors, customers and utilities whose interruption quietly becomes yours. This is the question the template pages never ask.

Begin with the product and its end use, then trace one normal production cycle. Where do components arrive? Which processes change them? When does raw material become work in process? Where does finished stock wait? Who picks it up, and at what moment does responsibility pass to a customer?

That map has to include more than the property the manufacturer owns:

  • Material supplied by a customer, still theirs while it sits on your floor.
  • Molds, dies, patterns, fixtures and tooling — often owned by someone else, almost always slow to replace.
  • Components at an outside processor or a contract manufacturer.
  • Finished goods at a third-party warehouse, away from the described location.
  • Product shipped under a purchase or sales contract, where the paperwork decides who bears the loss.
  • Research, prototypes, records or control systems that would be difficult to recreate.

Commercial property forms in Texas are not standardized, and property held for others or sitting away from the described location can need separate treatment. The contract, the financial interest, the declarations, the limits and the policy wording decide the answer — which is the honest reason this page asks so many questions before it names a single policy.

Sources: TDI — commercial insurance; TDI — commercial property insurance guide (cb021). Verified .

Machinery and lead time

Protect what makes the product

A building can survive a loss entirely while one machine stops the line. Sort the production equipment into groups that mean something operationally rather than financially:

  • machinery that can be repaired locally, by someone who answers the phone;
  • equipment with a long replacement or fabrication lead time;
  • electrical, pressure, refrigeration, boiler, compressor or control systems;
  • machinery owned by someone else and running on your floor; and
  • equipment whose failure would stop several downstream processes at once.

The building, business personal property, machinery, stock, property held for others, valuation and covered-cause-of-loss questions all belong to commercial property insurance, and that page explains them properly. What this page adds is which machine matters most, and why.

Mechanical, electrical and pressure-system breakdown is a separate check, because a critical machine can fail without a fire, a storm or anything else a property policy was written around. Texas identifies boiler and machinery as an additional commercial property coverage, and equipment-breakdown forms available in the market carry their own definitions, conditions and exclusions. Ordinary wear and tear is not the same thing as a covered accidental breakdown, and the two are constantly confused.

For a first conversation, identify the machine that would create the longest shutdown, the expected repair or replacement time, and any workaround that exists. That is worth more than the purchase price of everything on the floor.

Source: TDI — commercial property insurance guide (cb021). Verified .

Stages, not one number

Inventory changes as production moves

“Inventory” is one word doing four jobs. A manufacturer can hold all four at once, in different places, at different values:

Raw material Before the line
Components and inputs waiting to enter production, including anything a customer or supplier still owns while it sits on your floor.
Work in process On the line
Partly finished goods that already carry labor and manufacturing value. Worth more than the material that went in, and rarely counted that way.
Finished goods After the line
Ready for sale or shipment, at the plant, at a processor, or in a third-party warehouse. Peaks matter more than the annual average here.
Packing and shipping supplies Out the door
Cartons, pallets, labels, film. Easy to leave off a schedule until the day the product cannot ship without them.

Report an average and a maximum for each stage and each location, including seasonal or contract-driven peaks — the week before a big shipment is not the week the annual figure describes. Identify customer-owned property, consigned goods, inventory at processors, and stock held away from the main plant while you are at it.

The selected form controls how a covered loss is valued, so report the stage, the location and the peak rather than assuming one valuation method reaches every category of stock.

Owned goods moving between a supplier, a plant, a processor, a warehouse and a customer raise a separate question again. Depending on the ownership terms, the route, the mode and the policy, a shipper’s-interest, inland-marine, ocean-cargo or stock-throughput review may be the appropriate one. Texas sales law lets the contract terms and the shipment or destination structure decide when title, insurable interest and risk of loss pass, which is why the shipping terms matter before the route does. Availability and wording have to be confirmed rather than assumed.

One boundary is worth stating plainly, because it is the most common wrong turn a manufacturer takes: a motor truck cargo policy answers for a for-hire carrier hauling another party’s freight, and it is not the answer for a manufacturer’s own inventory in transit. If your operation also hauls other parties’ freight for payment alongside its own product, that is a genuinely different exposure with its own page: motor truck cargo insurance.

Source: Texas Business and Commerce Code ch. 2 (§§ 2.401, 2.501, 2.509). Verified .

Continuity

Find the interruption before it happens

The visible damage is only part of a manufacturing shutdown. The rest is time — lost income after covered property damage — and time is answered by questions asked well before anything goes wrong:

  • How long can the business operate without the critical machine?
  • Is replacement equipment readily available, or is it fabricated to order?
  • Can the work move to another line, another shift or another location?
  • Which utility is genuinely essential to production?
  • Is there a sole-source supplier or a single contract manufacturer?
  • Does one customer represent a material share of production?
  • What extra expense could shorten the interruption if it were available?

Business interruption insurance generally starts with covered direct physical loss or damage that prevents normal operations. Extra expense can address certain necessary added costs when the form provides for it. Contingency or dependent-property coverage can address an indirect loss involving a supplier or a customer, subject to the policy’s covered-loss requirement, definitions, named locations, limits, waiting periods and other terms.

A purchasing dependency or a customer concentration does not create coverage by itself. What it creates is a reason to identify the dependency before the form and the limit are chosen, because that is the only point at which the answer can still change.

Source: TDI — business interruption and other business insurance. Verified .

Four different outcomes

When the product leaves, hand off the product review

A manufacturing review has to flag four outcomes that sound alike and are not:

  • Alleged injury, or damage to other property, caused by the product once it is in use.
  • Loss to the manufacturer’s own product, which is a different question entirely.
  • The work and expense of a recall — finding it, withdrawing it, replacing it, telling people.
  • Performance allegations involving economic loss with no injury and no property damage at all.

Those four can land on different policy sections or on specialized forms. This page identifies them; it does not decide them. Product liability insurance owns the full product-harm, supply-chain-role, recall, contract, discontinued-product and specialty-placement review.

For the manufacturing intake, all we need first is the product, its end use, your role in the chain, the contracts you sign, any recall history, and where the product is sold.

Source: TDI — commercial general liability insurance. Verified .

The rest of the map

Complete the operating picture

The production map connects to several policy questions that are owned elsewhere, each for an operational reason rather than because it belongs on a list:

  • Premises and operations. Allegations arising from the site and the work rather than from the product sit with general liability insurance.
  • The workforce. Employee injury, and the Texas decision about carrying that coverage at all, belong to workers’ compensation insurance.
  • The vehicles. Pickups, deliveries, service calls and sales runs are commercial auto insurance — the vehicle is an auto question wherever the load is going.
  • One policy or several. For some smaller operations it is worth asking whether BOP insurance is even an option. Eligibility rules decide that, not preference, and many manufacturers sit outside them.

Machine guarding, hazardous-energy control, forklifts, chemicals, heat, pressure, food processing, medical products and other regulated operations can all change a submission, which is why we ask what the operation does. Some products also carry a reporting obligation to a federal regulator once statutory criteria are met. We ask about these because they change the insurance conversation — insurance does not replace a safety or product-compliance obligation, and an insurance review is not legal or regulatory advice.

Contracts matter for the same practical reason. Customer and vendor agreements can carry indemnity, insurance-limit, additional-insured, waiver or certificate requirements. Bring the insurance section to the licensed-agent conversation, and send the legal interpretation to counsel.

Source: CPSC — duty to report: rights and responsibilities of businesses. Verified .

Have these ready

What to have ready for the first conversation

You do not need to finish an underwriting application before you call. Start with what you already know:

  • The products — a short description and their end use.
  • The locations — primary manufacturing and storage sites.
  • The processes — the key production steps, in plain words.
  • The stock — average and maximum raw-material, work-in-process and finished-goods values.
  • The critical machine — the one whose failure would stop production longest.
  • Property in your care — customer-owned goods, tooling, molds, dies or components.
  • Imports and exports — imported components, contract manufacturing, export sales.
  • The dependencies — critical suppliers, customers, utilities and outside processors.
  • The vehicles — owned vehicles used for pickups, deliveries or other work.
  • The people — employee count and a broad payroll range.
  • Your current policy — carrier and renewal date, if there is one.
  • Any requirement — a customer, landlord, lender or vendor insurance demand.

Please do not send product schedules, formulas, designs, customer lists, contracts, loss runs, quality-control records, recall plans, safety-data-sheet libraries or other sensitive records through an ordinary website message. If documents are needed, call (281) 484-8320 and staff will provide an approved transfer method.

No obligation

Map the operation before choosing the pieces

Tell us what you make, where you make it, the maximum value at each production stage, the machinery the line depends on, and the suppliers or customers that could extend a shutdown. We will help organize that into a licensed insurance conversation instead of a policy list. The phone is fastest: (281) 484-8320, or use the form below.

Already a Moon customer who needs proof of existing coverage? Use the certificate of insurance request. A certificate documents coverage; it does not create or change it.

Monday to Thursday, 9:00 to 5:00; Friday, 9:00 to 4:00. Our Houston office is at 360 FM 1959, Houston, TX 77034. Policies written statewide — you do not have to be local.

Keep this to the basics — no contracts, loss runs, employee names, or incident details. Those come later, on the phone or through a secure route we will name.

Questions a manufacturing review raises

Is manufacturers insurance one policy?

No. It is an industry program assembled from the coverages the actual operation needs. Policy forms are not standardized in Texas, and eligibility, limits, valuation, conditions and exclusions vary between insurers and forms.

What if a critical machine fails without a fire?

Treat it as a separate equipment-breakdown question, because that is what it is. Texas identifies boiler and machinery as an additional commercial property coverage, and forms available in the market can address accidental mechanical, electrical or pressure-system breakdown subject to their own terms. Ordinary wear and tear is a different issue again.

How should raw materials, work in process and finished goods be valued?

Report each stage, each location and its maximum value. The policy’s valuation provision controls the answer — do not assume raw materials, work in process and finished goods share one valuation method.

What if a product must be recalled?

An ordinary commercial general liability policy does not pay the cost to recall faulty products. Third-party bodily injury or property damage and the expense of withdrawing your own product are two separate coverage questions, and they are asked of different forms.

What if a key supplier or customer shuts down after property damage?

Some policies can address contingent or dependent-property business interruption. The supplier or customer relationship, covered physical loss, policy definitions, named locations, limits, waiting periods and other terms decide whether coverage applies. Identify the dependency first; it is the part nobody can add later.

What if a product fails without causing injury or property damage?

Product liability focuses on covered third-party bodily injury or property damage. Manufacturers errors-and-omissions products available in the market can address certain economic-loss allegations involving product performance or services. Form, eligibility and availability control what is actually possible.

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