A small Danish design company decides to merge with its largest supplier in Thailand so that the company could take steps in the safety, health and environmental condition, along with labor standards to comply with the UN Global Compact principles. The company has shown a serious attitude towards its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and has incorporated a new standard for CSR in its supplier factories which would be implemented and audited by an NGO.
The company has shifted the attention to the certification of production inputs such as wood, which ultimately rise various other challenges. Western small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) faces the pressures to audit their supplier from developing countries, although, these SMEs do not have enough financial and political resources to make any change in supplier factories. The manager of the Quality has to determine the company’s sustainability approach. What would be the enough leverage a small company can expect to have with its suppliers?
Along with this, whether it would create a major impact on the cost to audit suppliers in the countries such as Thailand? The author, Dana Brown, has the affiliation with the University of Oxford while Jette Steen Knudsen has the affiliation with Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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