MAJOR APPAREL BRANDS AND MANUFACTURERS AIM
TO ADVANCE GLOBAL FACTORY
CONDITIONS
USING NEW COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO COMPLIANCE AUDITS
After decades of redundant inspections, major brands can now
jointly assess – and improve – factory conditions with new collaborative
technology
from Fair Factories Clearinghouse
New York, June 19, 2012 – Fair Factories Clearinghouse
(FFC), a non-profit organization that helps major brands and manufacturers collaborate
to ensure cost-effective, well-informed business transactions and improved
workplaces worldwide, today announced enhancements to its software and
collaboration platform that support a new approach for manufacturing audits.
Reliance on contracted manufacturing continues to increase,
as a growing number of top brands cite a need for sustainable changes in
factories and move away from individually spearheaded factory inspections to
jointly planned audits, shared information with other brands that source in the
same factories, and collaborative correction actions.
Empowered by technology developed by FFC specifically to cut
redundancy from factory compliance programs, international apparel manufacturers
including adidas, Nike, and VF Corporation now look beyond competitive concerns
to change the way they – and other major brands – assess and communicate with
factories. The ultimate goal is for sustainable improvement in factories,
rather than continuing with the redundant individual inspection processes
historically used by most brands.
“Today’s approach to factory compliance audits isn’t optimal,”
said Peter Burrows, executive director of Fair Factories Clearinghouse, the
not-for-profit organization that developed the technology. “Several brands
often source from the same factory, resulting in an unmanageable number of
audits and correction plans. Factories spend more time scrambling for upcoming
audits and squelching highest priority corrective issues rather than creating long-term
sustainable change. By adopting a collaborative approach, brands can shift
their focus to what matters: correction of root cause issues through long-term
and sustainable improvements to management systems, employee relations, and
environmental issues.”
FFC
Provides Safeguards that Avoid Anticompetitive Conduct
Following the US Department of Justice’s
issuance of a business review letter dated June 19, 2006, the FFC began
offering a secure hosted platform for brand and retailers to share information
on factory compliance audits. “The DOJ Business review letter issued to FFC was
a vital first step to permit FFC member companies - with numerous safeguards in
place - to minimize the possibility of any anticompetitive conduct when
collaborating on improving factory conditions,” stated Robert M. Langer, an
antitrust partner at Wiggin and Dana LLP, the Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania-based
law firm that spearheaded the FFC DOJ request. “The FFC and its members have
established a variety of protocols of behavior regarding the sharing of
compliance information that provided DOJ with sufficient comfort, thus
permitting the issuance of the Business Review Letter.”
The audit-sharing platform introduced by the
FFC in 2006 has undergone several enhancements as FFC members began to shift
their focus from comparing notes on historical audits that had already taken
place to more forward-looking collaborative actions. “Sharing historical audits
was an important first step for us,” notes Ron
Martin, Director of Compliance for VF. “The FFC sharing platform allowed us to find
other brands and manufacturers that source where we do; and through the
exchange of historical audits become comfortable that we could work with other
companies that had factory standards compatible with ours. Once we identified
compatible companies, we asked the FFC to give us new tools for compliance that
were more forward-looking and collaborative.”
Today, FFC’s audit collaboration release allows
for:
·
Calendar sharing: FFC members can post upcoming
events to enable joint factory visits or training;
·
Audit database integration: Sharing members can
initiate collaboration audits on the FFC platform with other members, then
export audit data back into their own proprietary audit databases for full
company reporting;
·
Role-based security system expansion: Members
can add employees at other brands as participants on new audits;
·
Social networking collaboration: Allows members to create
multi-company work teams, store, search, and rank audit-related documents;
·
Improved internal and external communication, including the ability
for all participants to comment separately on issues found and corrective
actions.
Member Support
is Strong
“The FFC has an uncanny ability to listen to its members and
anticipate where the fast paced world of factory compliance is going next,”
says Gregg Nebel, Head of Social and Environmental
Affairs, the Americas, at adidas Group. “Powered by the ability to invite other brands to participate in an
audit, within just a few months we were effectively and efficiently managing
several factory audits and corrective action plans that included as many as six
different brands and retailers. The FFC is a good software partner because they
stay close to what their members are trying to do and seek ways to improve and
support the work we’re doing. Last spring, members asked the FFC to make multi-company
collaboration audits easier to conduct and manage. They documented new
requirements based on our initial experiences and by September we were already
testing the new collaboration release and it is fantastic.”
“NIKE has been working with the Fair Factories Clearinghouse
to further enhance our Brand Collaboration Program and commitment to
transparency,” said Elizabeth Garvey, External
Partnerships/Sustainable Manufacturing Performance
for NIKE. “The FFC’s technology provides a platform for brands to work
together in many forms from identifying factory overlap between each other to
sharing compliance documents, utilizing a shared calendar to
pro-actively identify collaboration opportunities, and working together on
a shared corrective action plan for the same audit. NIKE has been a member of
the FFC since 2007. In FY11, we shared 39 percent of our audit results through
the FFC and
look forward to increasing our capabilities on their platform.”
About Fair Factories Clearinghouse
Fair Factories Clearinghouse (FFC), a non-profit
founded in 2004, was created to help those sourcing in the same factories
collaborate on improving ethical sourcing, monitoring factory conditions, and
establishing clear corrective action plans. FFC offers software that enables
its members to share information that ensures cost-effective and well-informed
ethical business transactions and improved workplaces globally.
Members include some of the world's most known
retailers, including adidas Group, Asics, Burberry’s, Business for Social
Responsibility Mills and Sundries Group, The Jones Group, Levis Strauss, LL
Bean, Macy’s, Marks Men’s Warehouse (Canadian Tire), New Balance, Nike,
Nordstrom, Patagonia, REI, and VF Corporation. For more information about FFC
or about becoming a member, visit: http://www.fairfactories.org.
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