Customers harness the power of multi-tier global supply chain mapping on Resilinc to proactively identify sub-tier vulnerabilities and protect their brand
Santa Clara, CA – Apr. 29, 2014 – Resilinc Corp., the leading provider of end-to-end supply chain resiliency solutions, today announced the immediate availability of SupplyIntel™ CSR Module™ to help companies interested in taking a proactive stand to protect against threats to their brand arising from inadequate management systems, controls and governance processes involving labor, ethics, and environmental compliance and sustainability.
Most companies have internal corporate policies regarding use of child labor or slave labor, bonded labor, sweat shops and working conditions, minimum pay and employee health, and environment friendly sustainable practices. However, recent examples have shown that companies need to address these issues not only within their own factories and businesses but also outside the four walls by including their direct and sub-tier suppliers in their global supply chain.
Increasingly, companies are being held accountable for the conduct of their suppliers and vendors in their supply chain network, even if the company has no supply chain visibility into their sub-tier supply chain. Apple and its contract manufacturer, Flextronics, provide a recent example. When poor working conditions at Flextronics’ factories became public knowledge, Apple received negative publicity which affected its brand. Prior to that, employee suicides at another contract manufacturer, Foxconn in China, also had a negative impact on Apple’s brand.
Another notable example of brand damage resulted from the tragic fire at a garment factory in Bangladesh owned by Tazreen Fashions which killed 117 people, making it the deadliest factory fire in Bangladesh history. The Tazreen Fashions factory was found to be a sub-contractor to a supplier to Walmart. Walmart had previously terminated relationships with this factory due to repeated violations and marked it high risk. However, a Walmart supplier had sub-contracted work to Tazreen Fashions, unbeknownst to Walmart. Though Walmart had not sanctioned the use of this sub-contractor, the company was nonetheless held to be morally responsible for having this sub-contractor in its supply chain network.
It should be noted that in this Walmart example it was a sub-contractor to a Tier 1 supplier that was in violation of Walmart’s code of conduct — a clear demonstration of why supply chain mapping is now a critical first step in understanding and mitigating brand risk.
In order to proactively protect their brand against these types of threats, companies need to first gain a better understanding of their global supply chain through supply chain mapping, which involves identifying the manufacturing locations worldwide that are used by their component suppliers, and then for each site gain a deeper understanding of their suppliers’ practices regarding labor and workers’ rights, as well as environmental and sustainable practices.
“Companies are finding their brands are vulnerable as the market holds brand owners accountable for the business practices of their suppliers. As is seen in California with the passing of the SB-657 legislation, this is on its way to becoming a compliance issue,” said Bindiya Vakil, CEO of Resilinc. ”Brand owners need a better way to identify which factories and sub-tier suppliers are used in their extended global supply chain, in order to make sure these suppliers accept and comply with the company’s code of conduct. The Resilinc CSR Module leverages the powerful multi-tier mapping capabilities of Resilinc’s market-leading technology platform, and enables brand owners to proactively manage the risk to their brands.”
Resilinc CSR Module™ for Brand Risk Protection
The Resilinc CSR Module™ is based on the EICC (Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition) standard and covers the management systems and business practices and controls instituted by the suppliers that govern labor practices, employee health and safety, and environmental compliance and sustainability. It is offered in combination with the unique supply chain mapping capabilities of the Resilinc platform. Resilinc SupplyIntel™ enables companies to identify factories worldwide that are used in manufacturing their parts and raw materials as well as the ownership of the factories, whether owned or sub-contracted.
The Resilinc CSR module enables brand owners to survey suppliers at the supplier and site levels. Resilinc provides all the supplier onboarding, training and data collection services needed to make the CSR survey process a low resource impact undertaking for customers. Additionally, Resilinc’s industry leading publish-once, share multiple times methodology enables suppliers to automatically share their business practices with many customers, thereby minimizing the effort required to provide the requisite information.
The Resilinc CSR solution also automatically generates scorecards at a site level and provides a quick heat map of the weakest areas where insufficient management systems and controls are prevalent. This allows the brand owners to quickly identify sites that might need to be audited, and suppliers who may need to be educated.
SupplyIntel Meets Today’s Risk Management Challenges
Resilinc SupplyIntel is specifically designed to address multi-tier visibility issues experienced in major global industries, including high-tech and electronics, automotive, medical devices and the life sciences. Resilinc SupplyIntel provides these and other industries with the foundational supply chain mapping capability that is core to addressing the challenges associated with supply chain risk management, conflict minerals compliance, business continuity and social responsibility.
With the business-critical addition of CSR capabilities, Resilinc SupplyIntel now delivers a complete and scalable solution for the entire spectrum of risk management challenges. SupplyIntel’s comprehensive capabilities include multi-tier mapping, event monitoring, and risk quantification and mitigation tools, together with a broad range of survey modules for business continuity mapping, conflict minerals, corporate social responsibility and supply chain security – all on a single integrated platform.
Resilinc’s model delivers benefits of the network effect as customers can quickly connect with many suppliers and adopt multiple capabilities at the lowest total cost of ownership, with the lowest resource impact and fastest time to value in the industry. Resilinc’s clients also realize a growing ROI over time as more and more supplier data can be seamlessly and securely shared with multiple clients.
Resources and Links
- Click to download the whitepaper “Resiliency – High Tech’s Next Big Supply Chain Undertaking”.
- Click to sign up for Resilinc EventWatch™ Professional, the leading global disruption event monitoring service.
About Resilinc
Resilinc is the leading provider of global supply chain resiliency solutions and delivers scalable enterprise solutions that enable supply chain professionals to gain visibility across multiple tiers of their complex, global supply chains. With a comprehensive offering that encompasses multi-tier supply chain mapping, single points of failure analytics, global disruption event monitoring and management, mitigation workflow, and part-level supply chain compliance programs such as conflict minerals, Resilinc has become the leader in comprehensive supply chain resiliency solutions. Resilinc helps customers achieve supply chain resilience through innovative and patent-pending technology, an extensive resiliency-driven supply network, and a proven comprehensive enterprise scale supply chain software solution that delivers strong value to both clients and supplier partners. For more information, visit https://www.resilinc.com.
Media Contact:
Marc Gendron
MarComm PR
559-824-8360
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