An overview of the various management standards
1. ISO 9000 Quality Management Systems
ISO 9000 is a series of International standards envisaged at achieving enhanced customer satisfaction by supplying products as per the customer requirements. It is a customer focused standards and works on the basis of the PDCA cycle and the eight quality management principles. The ISO Certification intends to give the added confidence to the customer by virtue of its compliance to international system standards and third party certification.
2. ISO 14000 Environmental Management Systems
ISO 14000 Environmental Management System is an international standard for environment Management Systems (EMS). This standard has been developed on the principle of P-Plan, D-Do, C-Check and A-Act (PDCA cycle, continual improvement & cost effectiveness.) This standard aims to conduct impact assessment keeping in view the numerous environmental aspects. Effective monitoring and control helps in optimization of the critical processes thereby reducing the effluent load on environment and also cost reduction.
3. OHSAS 18000 Health and safety Assessment systems.
Broadly speaking, the system aims at enabling an organization to establish a comprehensive framework for implementing safety and Occupational health policy and setting up objectives and to assess the effectiveness of the OH&S management system. Further, it enables in achieving conformance with the policy and systems and demonstrates such conformance to others.
4. SA 8000 Social Accountability Standards.
SA 8000 is an auditable certification standard that encourages organizations to develop, maintain, and apply socially acceptable practices in the workplace. It was developed in 1997 by Social Accountability International (SAI) The SA8000 streamlines the complexities of navigating industry and corporate codes to create a common language and standard for measuring social compliance. As it can be applied worldwide to any company in any industry, it is an extremely useful tool in measuring, comparing, and verifying social accountability in the workplace. It measures the performance of companies in eight areas important to social accountability in the workplace: child labour, forced labour, health and safety, free association and collective bargaining, discrimination, disciplinary practices, working hours and compensation.
The business social compliance initiative (BSCI) is the broadest business driven platform for the improvement of social compliance in the supply chain of commerce. The BSCI system covers all supplier countries and all consumer goods. The BSCI offers a common approach for European commerce, provides standardized Management Tools for all countries, supplies a database, information pool to optimize coordination of the process, is open to retailers, importers and manufacturers, cover all consumer goods, is transparent and involves stakeholders in Europe and supplier countries.
The Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production (WRAP) program is the world’s largest factory certification program focused on the apparel, footwear and sewn products sectors. WRAP certifies factories not brands of business. WRAP is not a membership organization; it is a non-profit non-government organization and has a Board of Directors that is independent of any industry group.
The WRAP principles are based on generally accepted international workplace standards, local laws and workplace regulations that encompass human resources management, health & safety, environmental practices and legal compliance also including import/export and customs compliance and security standards.
The Customs –Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) is probably the largest and successful government-private sector partnership to emerge post the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. From November 2001, when the C-TPAT was launched well over 6000 have been accepted as certified partners.
The guiding principles for C-TPAT have been voluntary participation and jointly developed security criteria, best practices and implementation procedures. C-TPAT partners have worked cooperatively with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to protect their supply chains from concealment of terrorist weapons, including weapons of mass effect and global supply chains are more secure today as a result of C-TPAT.
Sedex – the Suppliers Ethical Exchange – is a web-based filing cabinet which allows companies to store and view data on labour standards at their production sites. Third party auditors upload audit reports and summaries directly to the website. However, Sedex does not set any standards or determine the policy of its members. It is purely a tool for facilitating access to information. Sedex stores information on labour standards issues covered by ILO Conventions, ETI Base Code, SA 8000 or any form of social audit. Sedex members can use the information on the system to evaluate suppliers against any of these codes or the labour standards provisions in individual corporate codes. Sedex does not prescribe the type of audit. Sedex only provides a place to store any and all ethical audit reports, with summary of non-compliances held in a common format.
9. Post Certification Activities:
In order to demonstrate the continued relevance of Textiles Committee in the development of Small & Medium Entrepreneurs (SMEs), the Committee has introduced the post- certification activities. Till date more than 260 companies have availed the services of Textiles Committee for this purpose. The post certification services of the Textiles Committee have been well accepted by the industry particularly the SMEs and continues to get several clients in this area.