Sunday, February 28, 2010

Supply Chain Audits

Apple recently issued its annual Supplier Responsibility report for 2010 and they are getting some bad press for it.   IT blogger Engadget writes, "The findings are pretty damning on the whole, with more than half (54 percent) of all factories failing to meet Apple's already inflated maximum 60-hour work week, 24 percent paying less than the minimum wage, 37 percent failing to respect anti-discrimination rules, and three facilities holding records of employing a total of eleven 15-year olds (who were over the legal age of 16 or had left by the time of the audit)."  


While these are certainly nothing to be proud of, the fact that Apple is bringing these results to light should be applauded.  Not every company with a supply chain even does such an audit, so the fact that they do, is a step in the right direction.  

5 comments:

jaideep_in_supply_chain_world said...

Thanks for bringing this up - it should be applauded apple has indeed brought this up I thier annual report when most companies won't even care ..

Did it mention in which cointries however do most of these violations occur ?
Jd

Unknown said...

I've written an article that talks about this. It is a serious issue that does need to be addressed. The question is how? No company has complete control over its supply chains. http://www.scmblog.com/2010/03/apple-that-ate-child.html

Christian said...

Apple is finally doing what others in the industry have been doing for years. Since 2003, the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct has been established under the leadership of HP and IBM. Since those two companies have not only reported their audit results but also trained their suppliers on why such conducts are important for them. Actually, requests that seem normal for americans and europeans are not for some asians. Issues are typically to be found in China, and I am pretty sure that's where Apple found them too.

Web Security Guru said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Web Security Guru said...

You make a very good point, I think these audits are well over due. I read an similar interesting article on auditing foreign supply chains.

http://www.danbeeinvestigations.com/avoiding-pitfalls-when-conducting-foreign-supply-chain-security-audits