Shawn Bhimani, assistant professor of supply chain and information management at Northeastern University, introduces a new tool for exposing risks to importers posed by forced labor and other human right violations in extended supply chains.
When it comes to monitoring the presence of forced labor in supply chains, China is a “particularly difficult” country to track, Bhimani says. Audits of Chinese factories can’t be trusted, resulting in an absence of “ground truth” about violations of workers’ rights, especially for ethnic Uyghers in Xinxiang Province. And while U.S. Customs and Border Protection has stopped $2.8 billion worth of imported goods from that region since passage of the Uygher Forced Labor Prevention Act, it hasn’t managed to cut off the flow entirely.
For importers and regulators, identifying the provenance of imports from China requires extensive knowledge of the journey they took from production to arrival in the U.S. That’s “a depth of due diligence that most companies are not familiar with,” Bhimani says. In fact, he claims, there hasn’t been a tool that enables the complete tracing of any supply chain around the world, and where it buys from.
Until now. Bhimani is a principal investor and project lead at Supply Trace, a new open platform that was designed to allow companies to assess the risk of human rights violations throughout global supply chains. It analyzes more than 400 million data points, including detailed information on imports to the U.S. as well as intelligence from trained investigators. Users of the platform can call up specific companies, factories or product types (based on the Harmonized System code) to understand where the biggest risks are.
Supply Trace has been launched a pilot focusing specifically on Xinxiang Province, with an emphasis on cotton production, but will be expanded by product type and location within the next year. Currently it’s accessing information on some 17,000 facilities linked to reports of worker oppression, and will soon increase that number to 25,000. “The goal long-term is to be able to trace supply chains in total,” Bhimani says.
