Sedex > Case Studies > Co-op's Ethical Trade Programme: Enhancing Supply Chain Transparency with Sedex

Co-op's Ethical Trade Programme: Enhancing Supply Chain Transparency with Sedex

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Identity & Authentication Management
Sensors - Autonomous Driving Sensors

Applicable Industries

Buildings
Retail

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation
Procurement

Use Cases

Building Automation & Control
Supply Chain Visibility

Services

Training

About The Customer

Co-op is a company that champions ethical trade, striving to uphold the best labour standards in their supply chains and acting responsibly towards the workers who make their products. They have a robust ethical trading programme designed to manage risks and empower their suppliers to implement sustainable change, putting workers’ interests first. Co-op sources from 70 countries and has identified eight key areas of risk in their supply chain where they focus their activities. These areas account for around 75% of workers in their supply chain, and they prioritize 17 countries out of the total. Co-op is committed to increasing transparency as part of their Future of Food 2030 ambitions made to customers, members, and stakeholders.

The Challenge

Co-op, a company with a strong commitment to ethical trade, faced the challenge of managing a large, complex, and growing supply chain. They aimed to increase transparency and maintain high labour standards across their supply chain, while also reducing audit fatigue among suppliers. The company recognized the need for collaboration with other retailers and industry stakeholders to address common responsible sourcing challenges. They sought a solution that would allow them to standardize audits and share them with multiple businesses. Additionally, Co-op wanted to build strong supplier relations based on trust and transparency, with the goal of achieving long-term and sustainable improvements to working conditions in their supply chain.

The Solution

Co-op joined Sedex, a collaborative platform for sharing responsible sourcing data on supply chains. Sedex provides meaningful audit and supply chain data that Co-op uses to inform risk and mitigation strategies within their ethical trading programme. The platform allows Co-op to manage their supply chain data in one place, thereby increasing transparency. Sedex's Radar risk assessment tool empowers suppliers to proactively understand key trends and endemic issues that may affect their operational resilience or risk level and put in place action plans and activities to address these. Co-op also uses the Sedex portal to track and manage progress, assess and help improve suppliers’ capacity to manage risk, provide supplier training and capacity building, and collaborate with others to understand issues in the supply chain and identify solutions.

Operational Impact

The use of Sedex has brought numerous operational benefits to Co-op. It has reduced duplication of efforts and increased collaboration, enabling leverage through the collective voice of retailers and suppliers to directly improve the lives of workers globally. The Sedex platform has also allowed Co-op to monitor their entire supply chain’s ethical performance from one place, capitalising efficiencies wherever possible. Furthermore, Sedex data has been instrumental in engaging internal stakeholders. Using this data, Co-op’s Ethical Trade team is able to produce monthly reports that measure performance against KPIs, facilitating conversations with Co-op’s buying and technical teams, so that stakeholders across the business can continue working collaboratively towards Co-op’s ethical trade goals.

Quantitative Benefit

Co-op is able to access over 1,000 independent audits from their supply chain through the Sedex platform.
Over the last couple of years, there have been over 5,000 improvement actions made across their supply chain.
Co-op has over 650,000 workers across 2,480 supplier sites in their supply chain, which they have mapped on Sedex.