Human Rights in the End-to-End Supply Chain

“Certification programs have their merits and their limitations. With the growing availability of social media, analytics tools, and supply chain data, a smarter set of solutions could soon be possible”, as Robert Handfield and I argue in our paper, just published in Supply Chain Management Review. We believe that an evolution from company thinking to supply chain thinking will now help to make businesses more socially responsible: “Traditional solutions that focus just on a brand (e.g., Company A) or the labels used with the brand (e.g., a label saying that Company A’s product is ‘fair’) are being supplemented by solutions that recognize a brand’s network (e.g., Company A’s upstream supply chain) and reveal how all entities of that network are treated (e.g., an interactive map of the supply chain on a smart device)”. This transformation requires costly data, but becomes realistic as transaction costs are increasingly reduced due to new technologies, standards, and algorithms.

Wieland, A., & Handfield, R.B. (2014). The Challenge of Ensuring Human Rights in the End-to-End Supply Chain. Supply Chain Management Review, 18 (6), 49-51