Social Compliance
Hudson’s Bay Company has recently realigned its Quality Assurance and Social Compliance processes to improve sourcing practices and quality of products. This new streamlined approach enables suppliers to easily follow our product development process.
The objectives of streamlining the two processes include:
- Working collaboratively to develop desirable high quality products;
- Finding suppliers who share our value of high quality and ethical sourcing;
- Educating our suppliers on our standards and processes; and
- Promoting and maintaining a level of quality that meets or exceeds domestic and international regulations.
Hudson’s Bay Company suppliers are required to submit social compliance information prior to production in the factory. We can then ensure that the factory meets the standards set out in our Code of Vendor Conduct. If the factory is found to have social compliance issues, they are able to correct these problems before the production of Hudson’s Bay Company goods. All social compliance audit results are shared with the product development and Quality Assurance teams. This sharing of information ensures that there is full disclosure of factory information. As well, all teams in product development can also communicate with suppliers on issues of social compliance. By connecting quality assurance and social compliance, the supply chain becomes sustainable and allows for higher quality product for our customers.
Where we Source
Social Compliance Standards & Policy Manual
Our Social Compliance Standards & Policy Manual was revised in 2008 to incorporate a more comprehensive set of guidelines and expectations for our vendors and factories. Our goal was to clearly communicate the importance that each and every factory participates in our social compliance program prior to starting production without delaying the vendor set-up process. In order to help facilitate this process, we have integrated our Alternate Audit Policy to accept other brands and retailer’s audit reports and social compliance program guidelines to help factories avoid being inundated with numerous audits but focus on remediation.
We also introduced a new grade method utilizing a percentage system to accurately capture the progress of the factory’s continuous improvement over time. This improves the visibility of factory’s audit result to our sourcing team by using this data in our vendor score card to assess overall rating of the factory.
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