Social Compliance for Retail and CPG Companies

While ensuring the quality of products is of utmost importance to Retail and CPG companies, it is just as important to ensure the ethical production of products.Today, most companies are outsourcing their global production and manufacturing operations. Yet it remains their responsibility to ensure that their vendor and supplier workplaces foster an environment of safety, health, respect, and integrity. Ignoring this responsibility can result in labor law violations, unethical practices, and other such incidents which directly impact brand reputation and stock performance. To avoid this scenario, many companies are establishing "social compliance" policies, standards, and Codes of Conduct.

The challenge in enforcing social compliance lies in the vastness and complexity of most CPG and Retail operations. Geographically dispersed suppliers and vendors, and newer markets all make it difficult to determine how safe workplaces are, or how closely social compliance policies are being followed. The traditional approach to managing social compliance in a siloed and manual manner does not provide sufficient visibility into the state of compliance. It is also costly to manage, and is often not agile enough to support the growing complexity of business processes.

The MetricStream Social Compliance Management Solution enables Retail and CPG companies to facilitate a consistent culture of compliance, integrity, and accountabilityacross suppliers and vendors. The solution provides a comprehensive framework for managing all social compliance requirements, including:

		Laws and Regulations		Discrimination
		Health and Safety		Environmental Requirements
		Working Hours		Subcontracting
		Wages and Benefits		Free Association
		Women's Rights		Monitoring Compliance
		Child Labor		Communication And Record Keeping
		Slave Labor/ Human Trafficking		Disciplinary Practices

Using the solution, CPG and Retail companies can effectively design and implement a Code of Conduct and social compliance policies. They can also communicate and enforce these policies among vendor and supplier facilities, manage vendor on-boarding and information, train vendors, and streamline certification processes to validate compliance.

In addition to the above capabilities, the solution helps companies implement and monitor compliance controls at their vendor or supplier locations, and investigate and resolve any issues that arise. Compliance monitoring, in turn, is enabled through advanced capabilities forinternal compliance audits, onsite inspections, and periodic assessments based on risk levels. The solution also enables efficient scheduling, collaboration, and tracking of third-party audits. It seamlessly interfaces with multiple external systems to gather and consolidate all the information necessary to assess and ensure social compliance. Powerful dashboards and reports provide enterprise-wide visibility into the compliance process, facilitating accountability, and enabling managers to proactively identify discrepancies and areas of improvement.

Benefits

• Enable a systematic and structured approach to managing social compliance for suppliers and vendors.
• Control and monitor end-to-end social compliance initiatives -- right from policy implementation and communication, to control design and assessment, to audits, to reporting, to noncompliance issue investigation and resolution -- all from a single, centralized framework.
• Align social compliance with regulatory compliance to avoid redundancies and overlaps.
• Streamline the social compliance audit process, beginning with risk assessment and audit planning, and extending to audit execution, field data collection, reporting, and implementation of audit recommendations.
• Manage the entire social compliance training process from a single point of control.
• Save costs and resources by automating critical social compliance process.
• Efficiently track, investigate, and manage allegations of noncompliance with labor laws and other social compliance requirements.
• Stay updated on social compliance issues and trends in the CPG and Retail industries.