Supplier social assessment
GRI 414-1,2
Responsible sourcing at Oerlikon involves an ongoing investment in establishing and maintaining strong supplier partnerships. These relationships are key to ensuring that we maintain our research and production timetables, sustain uninterrupted operations and deliver on our obligations to customers and employees while trying to minimize environmental impact and risk.
Oerlikon’s supplier engagement model supports these objectives in a manner consistent with our guiding principles:
- Sharing risk.
- Embracing best practices and the open exchange of ideas.
- Conducting open and regular discussions to foster unified expectations.
- Streamlining processes to deliver excellence.
- Cultivating trust and mutual satisfaction in meeting challenges together.
As part of our selection process, we seek out suppliers who share our values and demonstrate an
unwavering commitment to upholding high ethical standards. Their operations and processes must
integrate seamlessly with our own in terms of sustainability and the upholding of world-class standards of management.
The Oerlikon Supplier Code of Conduct, which is published in English, German, Italian, Chinese, Hindi and Turkish, and publicly available for download on our corporate website, sets out our baseline requirements for supplier and subcontractor business ethics as well as legal and regulatory compliance, including:
- Compliance with laws, regulations and internationally recognized standards.
- Material and conflict minerals compliance (see relevant case study).
- Business integrity.
- Human rights, fair labor conditions and child labor.
- Health, safety and environmental management.
- Protection of tangible and intangible assets.
- Trade control.
Once we identify a prospective supplier, we invite them to go through our five-stage relationship management process. Oerlikon only pursues relationships with suppliers that complete this process and agree to be signatories of our Supplier Code of Conduct.
100% of our procurement colleagues are trained in the Supplier Code of Conduct, and they strictly
apply these standards in their assessment and selection of new suppliers. Every year, we audit more than 60 of our suppliers to ensure that our Supplier Code of Conduct is respected. In the event that there are areas identified as noncompliant, we address the issue with the suppliers and retain the right to terminate the relationship if the nonconformance issue persist.
Our Performance
In 2020, Oerlikon created a blueprint for conducting an assessment to identify risks within our business
and across the supply chain. We will integrate newly identified risks into the Group’s risk management
strategy and, based on the outcomes of the assessment, develop an updated human rights policy and amend our procurement policies and strategies in 2021. This exercise may bring to light new considerations that may result in amendments to the Supplier Code of Conduct. Those updates would cover declarations of sustainability compliance and would require self-assessments at a minimum,
with that target escalating to third-party assessments and auditing by 2030.
