Social Impact Supply Chain

Consumers now not only want to know the quality and environment impact of the product they purchase but also about who produced the product and in what conditions was it produced. A lot of social impacts are overlooked intentionally or otherwise by companies due to their major focus on production and effectively managing the supply chain. A socially responsible company looks at the social impact of its products and production techniques not just within its sphere of production but across the supply chain. The extremely elaborate nature of supply chains may sometimes make the companies unaware of the social impacts as they have varying degree of control over them.

The study of environmental impact of Supply Chain has been more widely studied

There are four interrelated challenges to measure the social impact: establishing the measurement indicators, prioritizing them, tracking these issues across the supply chain and developing methods and strategies to address these issues. Lack of accessibility to these the operations of other supply chain partners sometimes proves to be the most challenging task. Considerable attempts have been made to find the most representative set of

Stakeholders include employees, suppliers, shareholders and community. The GRI framework has 4 categories of social impact indicators viz., Labour Practices and Decent Work, Human Rights, Society and Product Responsibility. The GRI framework gives explicit guidelines on reporting and also sources of information like suppliers, community programs, external stakeholder forums, internal departments etc.

Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products

The Social Lifecycle Assessment guidelines were published by UNEP in 2009. In addition to Environmental LCA, S-LCA was introduced to capture all three dimensions of sustainability in the triple bottom line concept. The S-LCA differs from SIA mentioned previously in two important aspects. First, S-LCA works on the enterprise management level unlike SIA and E-LCA. Second, the S-LCA looks at the life cycles of the product and therefore takes supply chain into consideration. SIA can also be used to include supply chain; however it does not explicitly look at the product life cycle in its assessment.

S-LCA is a four step process consisting of problem definition, Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), Lifecycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) and interpretation. However, unlike E-LCA it relies more on qualitative data. S-LCA is an iterative process and works with social hotspots which makes it well suited for supply chain