HSB teams up with HELIXintel

HSB, a Munich Re insurer of equipment breakdown and specialty coverages, has partnered with maintenance management company, HELIXintel, to offer customers a digitized equipment maintenance platform. The two-sided, online platform is available to clients and customers of HSB’s equipment breakdown coverage and the sensor solutions by HSB program. 

The platform serves as a digital workspace for multiple parties involved in supporting and maintaining a piece of equipment – such as original equipment manufacturers or other trading partners, like public utilities. 

“There's just never been a way for everyone who wants to help that [equipment] work on one platform,” says Jon DeWald, chief executive officer and co-founder of HELIXintel, in an interview with Digital Insurance. “By creating a digital twin of the [equipment], we're able to take the information that each one of those parties within the ecosystem need to provide support – and then create a digital platform where everyone can collaborate and work together in one place.”

Once a piece of equipment’s information is entered into the system, the data is accessible to those parties involved in its management and care. 

David Schraeder, chief business officer for the custom accounts division of HSB, says the platform is “helping with inflation, helping with preventative maintenance, helping with capital management and planning, and helping to short circuit the supply chain problem.”

DeWald also notes that utility companies offer incentives for proper, regular and preventative maintenance, as well as incentives for purchasing new energy efficient equipment – thus, the platform will correlate a customer’s maintenance activity to other incentives that are available. For example, when a customer is ready to purchase a specific type of equipment, the platform can recommend an energy efficient model being incentivized by their utility company.  

The suggestions from the platform “help them reduce [customers’] downtime because of maintenance, find them additional capital and really just bring everyone into this digital workspace,” DeWald says.

The Sensor Solutions Program by HSB, a sensor technology now embedded into HELIXintel’s platform, will send alerts for equipment maintenance to all the necessary parties, within an organization, who need to resolve issues. 

DeWald explains that if the “system or any sensor technologies job is to preemptively alert you on issues, our platform then takes the alerts and then actually triggers the process to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

The platform also allows for the direct purchasing of equipment replacement parts from manufacturers, which reduces costs and time.