Empowering Responsible Value Chains

The Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013 has opened the eyes of many supply chain managers: Implementing a socially responsible supply chain has, indeed, become an imperative for global corporations and the supply chain management discipline might be in the middle of a paradigm shift. A World Economic Forum report, Beyond Supply Chains: Empowering Responsible Value Chains (pdf; prepared in collaboration with Accenture), examines how companies strive for what the authors call “the triple supply chain advantage” – realizing societal, environmental and business benefits at the same time – and looks at how they intend to achieve it. The authors present a comprehensive set of 31 practices “that provide guidance for companies looking to codify their own specific portfolio of triple advantage improvement measures”. For each of these practices a detailed value assessment and good practices from companies are provided. This report is a good start when implementing a socially responsible supply chain.