Top Regulations to Monitor for Ethical Supply Chains
Inspectorio Inc
August 9, 2023
“Monitoring factory compliance is a complex task that has become even more complicated during COVID-19,” writes Sourcing Journal. “In addition to keeping tabs on social and environmental standards, companies now have a significant interest in ensuring health and safety practices that protect workers from the virus. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, Inspectorio saw an opportunity to simplify the audit process.”
Inspectorio’s Rise platform has been nominated by The Sourcing Journal as an honoree in the category of Traceability & Transparency in their Sustaining Voices initiative. Sustaining Voices focuses on companies making strides to secure a more environmentally responsible future for the apparel industry, celebrating organizations that are developing “creative innovations, scalable solutions and forward-thinking initiatives” with the aim of putting sustainable processes into immediate action. We at Inspectorio feel privileged and honored to count ourselves among these organizations.
About Inspectorio Rise
Facility compliance monitoring has traditionally been painful to manage effectively and at scale. Today’s supply chain is increasingly interconnected, with brands and retailers often sourcing from common factories and suppliers. And yet, as Sourcing Journal writes, “Despite the interconnected nature of the fashion supply chain, auditing has traditionally been a siloed activity”. Data is often isolated, making it difficult to achieve common expectations amongst all stakeholders. Often, brands and retailers require their factories to assess themselves against hundreds of international as well as proprietary standards (including environmental, social, and health & safety standards). Despite having completed identical assessments for other clients, factories must comply. This leads to redundant tasks, additional costs, and more importantly, audit fatigue.
“Without a way to share data across disparate systems, the manufacturer is tied to the time-consuming process of doing individual audits for each customer,” writes Sourcing Journal. The problems don’t end there — for brands, comparing the results of audits against their standards is often done manually. “Inspectorio’s Rise platform was designed to streamline the compliance auditing process by centralizing it on one platform.”
As consumers hold companies more and more accountable for their environmental and social standards of production, they are under increasing pressure to monitor compliance with these standards efficiently and effectively at scale. “Rise was born to address each and every pain in the current operating model of facility compliance monitoring with a platform solution,” says David Klein, President & Co Founder of Inspectorio. The Rise platform “truly leverages the interconnected nature of our supply chain.”
What makes Rise different?
Equivalency:
Rise enables brands and retailers to automate equivalency of third party standards to their own internal codes of conduct. A simple mapping interface allows users to create pre-defined links between specific sections, as well as questions and answers for specific issues for any given standard in their internal code of conduct. This auto-mapping mechanism means that brands and retailers can now see all of their factory and supplier matrix performance data translated to their own internal standard, allowing them to trigger and manage Corrective Actions and Preventive Actions (CAPAs).
Collaborative Network Dynamics:
All stakeholders have one digital identity on Inspectorio and can connect with each other. This creates private networks mirroring their business relationships in real life. Vendors and factories can seamlessly share data to showcase the results of audits conducted at their facilities, including third parties, so that they can proactively avoid duplicating that audit with clients. This results in significant savings for brands and retailers and diminishes audit fatigue for vendors and factories.
Centralized reporting and analytics:
All self-assessment and verification data is centralized in one platform for stakeholders to view. This creates the unique ability for all stakeholders to have a centralized source of truth and universal visibility over their performance in real time. Improvements are only possible if the underlying performance data is viewed equally and efficiently — in other words, data is only valuable if you can translate it into actionable insights. Inspectorio Rise makes actionable insights visible to all key stakeholders.
Configurability and flexibility:
Rise has been painstakingly designed to provide the highest degree of configurability and flexibility. We understand that each company has their own internal processes, and it is key that these processes can be mirrored on our Rise platform. Rise allows you to create the assessment questionnaires yourself, adding the ability to upload videos, create answer-based flows, add file upload modules, and more. You can also create your own scoring and rating logic as well as thresholds to trigger CAPAs. Flexibility was a cornerstone in the conception of Rise, which is why any third party assessment results can be hosted on the platform, bringing the full scope of a compliance program together in one place. This translates to reviewing all reports and CAPAs in their own respective locations, giving you a holistic and complete understanding of performance.
Quality and Compliance is centralized:
Inspectorio’s quality module (Inspectorio Sight) is interconnected with Inspectorio’s compliance module (Inspectorio Rise) so that activities can be automatically triggered based on compliance or quality results. All of the quality and compliance data for a given facility is centralized in one single platform, allowing for a complete and holistic view of a company’s quality and compliance profile.
Inspectorio Rise & COVID-19
When the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the supply chain ecosystem that we knew and operated in transformed with it, necessitating a new way of operating. Countries would begin to reopen in the coming months, leading to an inevitable resurgence in demand. For brands, retailers, and suppliers, the biggest concern was universal: how could they reactivate their production chains without putting factory workers at risk?
The answer was to quickly and effectively disseminate health & safety guidelines to all factories and to closely monitor compliance with those guidelines. As our CEO, Carlos Moncayo, stated in his open letter to the industry, “Just as we are indirectly responsible for ensuring the social and environmental standards of our partner facilities, we are doubly responsible for ensuring that human beings are not risking a devastating outbreak to build our products. […] We must act now, and we must do it together as an industry.”
However, without insight into what was happening on the ground, and with suppliers and factories scattered across the globe, the challenge for brands and retailers was how to effectively deploy new health and safety guidelines, monitor compliance and address non-compliance & areas to improve, all in a way that was fast and scalable.
The Inspectorio Rise platform was uniquely positioned to help. Being ready and capable of implementing health & safety audits remotely and at scale, Rise let organizations leverage real-time monitoring & reporting, automatic CAPAs, powerful analytics to mitigate the risk of further factory closures, and most importantly, to protect lives.
Because of this, we offered use of the Rise platform free of charge for any organization that wanted to become involved in this initiative.
To ensure our solution was truly capable of meeting the challenges posed by COVID-19, we adapted the Rise platform, developing several new features:
A library of COVID-19 Health & Safety Guidelines: We curated a library health & safety guidelines, based on industry best practices and developed in collaboration with leading brands, retailers and international NGOs. These enabled our partners to disseminate vital anti-contamination protocols to their entire production ecosystems quickly and at scale.
COVID-19 Monitoring Dashboard and QR Code: This dashboard enabled brands and retailers to monitor compliance with health & safety guidelines in real time, giving them remote visibility into the actual situation on their factory floors, alongside location-based updates on the COVID-19 status of each facility. The accompanying QR code created a quick and easy way for vendors and factories to share their health and safety assessment results with all of their business partners (even if those without access to the Rise platform).
Automated CAPA Recommendations: These pre-configured corrective action recommendations allowed organizations to swiftly address health & safety non-compliance, and quickly facilitate continuous improvement.
Health & Safety E-learning Course and Resource Centre (Accessible through the Rise platform): COVID-19 Health & Safety courses (and other resources) were made available to provide on-the-go corrective and preventive training solutions.
“All members of the supply chain have a duty to produce more sustainability for this generation and the next,” said David Klein. “The interconnected nature of our supply chain reinforces the need to work together on issues that affect us all. Technology provides the means to achieve that goal, but we must work in the form of pre-competitive collaboration. This lack of pre-competitive collaboration is our industry’s biggest obstacle to overcome.”
Read more about how the Inspectorio Rise platform can streamline your environmental, social, and health & safety compliance efforts.
