RESPONSIBILITY > CREATING A CULTURE OF RESPONSIBILITY > SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
SUPPLIERS SHARE OUR COMMITMENT TO PATIENTS
At AbbVie, we succeed as a business and corporate citizen because of quality supplier partners who share our commitment to elevating patient care around the world. These suppliers help us address some of the world's most pressing health challenges. They share our commitment to innovation. We work with our supplier network to ensure quality, compliance, and social responsibility. We communicate and work with them regularly, monitoring and helping them enhance performance based on our well-defined, stringent metrics.
SUPPLIER QUALITY AND DEPENDABILITY
We work closely with our suppliers to continually learn and improve. We conduct formal management reviews and performance audits to ensure that their materials meet our high expectations for technical specifications, quality and safety. We also partner with suppliers to help them improve their social responsibility programs and results.
All AbbVie suppliers are provided Supplier Guidelines, which are published in multiple languages. These guidelines outline our expectations in the areas of: Ethical behavior, business integrity and fair competition, human rights, privacy, labor rights and worker protection, animal welfare, environmental stewardship, and health and safety practices.
SUPPLIER SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
We monitor supplier social responsibility performance, and offer a program to help suppliers meet our expectations in the areas of employee health and safety, fair labor practices, diversity, ethics and environmental stewardship. We believe that setting clear expectations, offering training and monitoring, and providing counsel will help our suppliers implement an aligned approach to social responsibility.
Our Global Purchasing compliance team identifies suppliers in high-risk industries and geographies, and conducts intensive screenings in emerging markets. We survey suppliers using principles defined by the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative (PSCI), an industry consortium dedicated to advancing consistent expectations within the supply chain related to social issues. AbbVie often exceeds these principles, particularly through our on-site audit program. We conduct regular audits at all of our suppliers, and also audit high-risk suppliers to confirm that they provide:
- Safe working conditions
- Dignified and respectful treatment of
employees
- Responsible manufacturing processes
- Adequate management systems
- Ethical practices
We are proud of our comprehensive social responsibility program, which includes a sophisticated supplier classification model, a quarterly results tracking scorecard, a semi-automated audit report, and a thorough process for increasing awareness of our program worldwide. Our supplier social responsibility audit program is also supplemented with third-party audits designed to assess a larger number of suppliers based outside the United States, targeting the high-risk countries identified in our supplier classification model.
