Top Regulations to Monitor for Ethical Supply Chains
Inspectorio Inc
August 9, 2023
One new norm is certain to persist in the post-COVID-19 world: health and safety will be under close scrutiny. Inspectorio’s Rise platform “enables organizations to protect workers’ health and safety at a time when it is more important than ever,” writes Sourcing Journal.
By allowing brands and retailers to implement COVID-19 health measures remotely in overseas supply chain facilities, Rise can help organizations battle the next wave of outbreaks.
Wuhan, China is currently being viewed as an experiment in containment. Emerging from lockdown after its battle with the virus, the 11 million-person city will be under close watch to gauge whether its efforts were successful. Without herd immunity, vaccines, or a thorough understanding of the virus, Wuhan appears vulnerable to a second outbreak and shutdown.
Unfortunately, every country on earth shares this same vulnerability.
Progress thus far is largely thanks to countries implementing lockdown and social distancing measures. While this has flattened the curve, further action will be required to protect people when normal life resumes.
The apparel industry faces a unique challenge in that it must restart production while also protecting workers from outbreaks. The Sourcing Journal writes that it is the “collective responsibility of everyone across the supply chain to ensure that precautions are put in place to ensure production facilities are safe.” Brands and retailers today are held accountable for the conditions of their supply chains and will be held especially accountable for failing to implement outbreak prevention measures. To prepare properly, the industry must act now, and act together.
The challenge for an apparel brand lies in implementing these measures across its entire global supply chain with the speed, comprehensiveness, and visibility required to successfully address this pandemic.
Sourcing Journal writes that Inspectorio’s Rise platform “makes this process much more streamlined and quicker than it would be otherwise.” Rise is a network solution that lets brands and retailers collaborate with suppliers to implement COVID-19 health and safety programs. It features real-time compliance monitoring, automated CAPA and continuous improvement plans, and robust, data-driven risk analysis that makes decision-making less subjective. A new suite of COVID-19-specific capabilities has been added to further optimize the platform for today’s challenge.
However, mutually agreed-upon health and safety guidelines are necessary for an effective and smooth transformation. Without them, suppliers will continue to perform repetitive audits for each client they supply to. This is why Inspectorio has spearheaded a collaboration between major brands, retailers, and global NGOs to curate a library of COVID-19 workplace readiness guidelines. These are hosted on the Rise platform, and with them, all stakeholders can monitor in real-time how facilities comply with and improve upon risk mitigation measures as they prepare to reopen. With a common library or set of guidelines in place, and all information centralized to the same platform, brands and retailers can efficiently and rapidly implement changes and identify facilities where more support is needed.
When operations resume, the Rise platform makes it possible to continuously monitor health and safety compliance, seamlessly generate CAPAs and proven resolutions, and protect workers from outbreaks. This is more important now than ever. However, as Sourcing Journal writes, “this cannot be a single company effort – this must be an industry effort.”
