Goals and progress
Supply chain | Helping factories move forward
We want long-standing relationships with the factories that make our products, and we take a long-term view of our work with them, provided they meet our expectations around factors such as quality, cost and compliance. This means that, over time, we need to assess each factory’s ability to adhere to the requirements outlined in our Code of Vendor Conduct (COVC).
Based on site visits and comprehensive monitoring, each factory receives a rating based on a scale of Level 1 to 5. Level 5, or “excellent,” indicates that we’ve found either no or few minor violations of our code. Level 1 means that we’ve found many violations, ranging from minor to serious. A Level 1 factory is in danger of losing our business if management does not demonstrate improved compliance with the code.
Rating factories is a challenging process with many nuances. It requires us to make subjective decisions about the weight of various issues. For example, we define "key" violations as having a greater negative impact on a factory's rating than "non-key" violations — and we weigh them accordingly.
We regularly review our list of key issues to ensure that it’s consistent with the conditions our Vendor Compliance Officers (VCOs) are seeing in factories. We also consult our stakeholders for their insight and guidance.
Our factory rating system has improved with experience, as has our ability to track and capture data. In 2007, we implemented a new system that enables us to search for and document factory issues in much greater detail. This shift required us to update how we calculate our ratings, as reflected in the factory rating data reported on this website.
