SGS Responsible Supply Chain Assessment supports you to advance human rights across your operations and meet stakeholders’ expectations while avoiding reputational damage and hefty penalties.
Evolving requirements to respect and protect human rights and demands for supply chain transparency create an urgent need for decisive solutions that support your supply chain management, continuous improvement and efforts to meet due diligence requirements.
Moving away from traditional audits of working conditions, we can help you foster responsible business practices and mitigate human rights risks and adverse impacts across your supply chain.
Let us support you to advance human rights across your operations and meet stakeholders’ expectations while avoiding reputational damage and hefty penalties, such as fines and delayed time to market.
Special focus on your industry and various workplaces
Although Responsible Supply Chain Assessment is designed to assess any organization’s human rights risks and impacts, our comprehensive tool is easily adaptable to focus on risks and impacts specific to your industry or sector (including food, automotive, service and textile).
Equally important are the varying levels of vulnerabilities and risks found within the diverse working environments throughout extended supply chains. From a traditional manufacturing or office setting to something a bit different, like a farm or fishing vessel, we can help you gain visibility and promote safe and responsible business practices across your network.
Cost-effective, efficient and robust, Responsible Supply Chain Assessment supports organizations and their suppliers seeking to improve working conditions as per international standards, evolving legal requirements and best practices.
Adopting a holistic approach – management systems and business practices
Our holistic approach to assessing human rights risks and impacts, including determining the maturity of suppliers’ management systems and processes, will help you, your suppliers and their supply chains consistently manage and sustain best practices over time.
Responsible Supply Chain Assessment also considers the varying formality of systems inherent to different working environments, adapting to each circumstance to ensure the appropriate assessment and evolution of compliance.
This helps you to promote a culture of human rights due diligence and responsible business conduct across your supply chain, assisting you to achieve and communicate your ambitions and contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
What areas are covered?
Assessment areas include:
- Management systems and human rights due diligence
- Compliance with laws and client requirements
- Forced labor and responsible recruitment
- Child/young labor
- Discrimination, equality and diversity
- Grievance mechanisms and disciplinary actions
- Freedom of association and collective bargaining
- Working hours
- Wages and benefits
- Health and safety
- Environment
- Anti-bribery and integrity
What are the key benefits?
The advantages include:
- Understand your suppliers’ operations by collecting information on their facilities and practices. This is a unique way to achieve supply chain-wide visibility
- Create more productive and sustainable workplaces, and attract and retain talented workers
- Save time and money through flexible and streamlined single or multisite audits
- Showcase your shared values through managing and monitoring compliance with numerous human rights regulations and international standards
- Contribute to the UN SDGs, including goals 1, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 16
- Substantiate your sustainability/ESG reporting and evidence transparency across your supply chain to customers, consumers and investors
- Promote a culture of respect for human rights and improvement of working conditions
- Avoid costly penalties and delaying products going to market
- Count on a global network of experts, trained to assess risks in various industries and working environments, aligning with international standards, legal requirements and best practices
30+ years in the social audits arena
Active in social responsibility and certification since their inception, we have performed social audits for over 30 years, supported by an extensive team of specialists.
Our expertise enables us to offer precise tools that consider requirements and expectations and provide visibility of potential adverse impacts on human rights throughout even the most complex supply chains.
Highly qualified SGS auditors will assess your suppliers’ performance, compliance and systems for accountability in respecting human rights. Using their compassion and knowledge, our auditors will also speak with employees confidentially to gain their trust, so they provide honest accounts of working conditions.
As a strategic partner, SGS’s new Responsible Supply Chain Assessment offers a robust and holistic approach that supports your organization’s due diligence efforts to assess, benchmark and promote continuous improvement to transform the way you do business with partners.
What drives our tool?
Responsible Supply Chain Assessment has three key driving factors:
- The increased need for visibility of potential human rights violations, and greater consumer and investor awareness of risks
- The natural evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) toward more robust responsible sourcing programs
- Global emphasis on human rights due diligence, including the required actions of organizations and their extended supply chains
Human rights criteria and developing the tool
The tool aligns with numerous international standards, including the International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions and Recommendations, and Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, as well as UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Furthermore, it considers all ILO Forced Labour indicators and other principles like the Employer Pays Principle.
Reinforced by highly skilled auditors
SGS auditors conducting these audits meet the appropriate Association of Professional Social Compliance Auditors’ (APSCA) qualification criteria.
Where next?
Contact us for more information or to start your supply chain-wide social journey.
For further information, please contact:
Jason Hulbert
Associate Marketing Manager
Knowledge
t: +44 7912 426878
About SGS
We are SGS – the world’s leading testing, inspection and certification company. We are recognized as the global benchmark for sustainability, quality and integrity. Our 97,000 employees operate a network of 2,650 offices and laboratories, working together to enable a better, safer and more interconnected world.
