Reference no: EM132217830

Case study

Imagine you are the procurement manager for the fastest growing fashion company in Australia. You source production from a range of countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia and China. The senior management team are becoming increasingly concerned with the ethics and sustainability of production and want to make this part of the company’s reputation and business model.

One morning your communications manager walks into your office to inform you of a big problem. The Guardian newspaper has run a story that morning about mass faintings in the main factory you source from in Cambodia.  Your company’s name is mentioned a number of times in the article as the number one procurer from that factory.  The report notes that around 70 women fainted last week, with mass faintings becoming a frequent occurrence.  The article quotes from one of the women in the factory who had fainted.  She says she regularly feels weak and dizzy at work. The factory’s cooling system does little to reduce the temperatures in the sweltering hot building, she says, and she is perpetually hungry, thirsty and stressed on the job.

“Everyday is more and more difficult. The managers say they are losing profits and they have given us higher quotas,” she says. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night because I’m so frustrated about work.”

You conduct investigations about these faintings to find out how much the company knows and what action has been taken in the past.  You find that your company was alerted to mass fainting of workers in its supply chain factories previously.

With regard to actions taken by your company in the past, your predecessor had asked the factory manager to investigate the causes and address these issues. However, the factory manager had replied that this was not possible within the current production budget. That budget is determined by the cost per unit paid by your company for the orders.

questions to answer

1. Your immediate media strategy (as procurement manager)

2. Your company’s new ethical procurement strategy which will ensure that you fix the problem long-term.