Factory Social Audit

Factory Social Audit

In a globalized world, consumers can easily be made aware of issues related to poor conditions of production for a particular favourite garment brand. They may later be called upon by NGO or other types of activists to refrain from buying it. In response to lobbying from responsible investors and consumers, buyers and distributors are steadily being encouraged to put in place their own solutions to evaluate the compliance of their suppliers to local and/or international regulations and standards.

What is a Social Audit of a Factory?

The objective of a social audit is to provide an unbiased image of supplier organization and practices according to local laws and international standard as well as your internal code of conduct. In addition to this analysis, our team will also define a corrective actions plan. Our specialists can also help you to implement monitoring and follow-up on this list of actions. If you wish, our auditors can be part of the change management process by delivering in-house training.

Thanks to this continuous monitoring of your pool of suppliers, your company can protect its brand image and improve its competitiveness. Managing your social risk should bring associated costs saving and should also foster long term cooperation with a selected pool of suppliers.

Since 2007, API audits has developed professional solutions in technical and social auditing, and acquired global recognition in the field by becoming one of the few auditing firms to be accredited by the ICS initiative. This initiative is led by France’s largest retailers such as Carrefour, Auchan and Casino. In 2015, API further strengthened its expertise by becoming a member of SEDEX, a global not-for-profit membership organization, home to the world’s largest collaborative platform for sharing responsible sourcing data on supply chains.

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Benefits of this Factory Social Audit

The trends in retail have shifted and indicate that consumers today are more concerned about the way in which their products are made and the conditions in which they were made. 

In saying this, a social compliance audit will go a long way in making sure that: 

  • Brand’s image protection from unnecessary risks. 
  • Increased supply chain visibility and transparency with adequate documentation.  
  • Identification of supply chain weak points for supplier improvement and development of long-lasting relationships.

Why choose API for your Social Auditing?

Our approach to deliver an unbiased, comprehensive and relevant analysis of suppliers:

Because we maintain a close relationship with our customers, we can deliver a truly dedicated level of service, more specifically thanks to:

  • Tailor made and responsive solutions that larger companies cannot provide.
  • API Audit never hesitates to go an extra mile to accompany our customers.
  • API aims to act as an integrated part of our customer’s quality management system.

Because an audit result has no value without a genuine impartiality, we place a strong focus on ethics. This is why in API has developed:

  • A code-of-conduct with ethical values beyond the requirement of accreditation schemes.
  • Staff training, continuous supervision and random inspections to ensure adherence to the company’s code of conduct.
  • Strong procedure for monitoring auditor integrity.

Because only a strong local regulations and practices related expertise can provide added value to our customers, we place a strong emphasis on training and maintaining a highly skilled team of auditors:

  • Mix of international ( mostly European ) and local staff in auditing teams.
  • Auditor selection based on skills, knowledge and experiences.
  • Strong in-house training and expertise follow-up procedures.
  • Technical manager involved in European standardization committees.

Because our size and flexibility allows us to provide you with the best value for money, we have developed a scalable and adapted price grid to fit our customers’ needs:

  • A pricing system per man/day that is very straightforward and transparent.
  • We take pride in ensuring that no customer is ever overcharged.
  • Existing infrastructure and economies of scale are attractive to large volume customers.