Translations Best practice in Spanish version Best practice in French version Best practice in English version

ORANGE initiates international cooperation to promote responsible procurement

5. Fair Operating Practices

Responsible purchasing

Context

Orange is one of the main telecommunications operators as it serves 250 million customers around the world. The CSR is deeply embedded in the culture and the history of the company. Orange has been built on founding values guiding their principles of action regarding all its stakeholders. In its policy of control of the environmental and societal risks, Orange deemed essential the preventive control of supplied products and working conditions on manufacturing premises.

Objectives

  • To enhance the inclusion of the CSR challenges by the suppliers, through mobilizing the purchasers of the sector
  • To cooperate with its competitors in order to control and influence their common suppliers more efficiently
  • To pool the CSR audits of suppliers according to a shared method to allocate costs and share the results

APPROACH

Since 2007, Orange has audited and controlled its Asian suppliers, particularly in China. Since 2009, these audits have been conducted by a specialized external company and have comprised a social part based on the international norm.In 2010, Télécom Orange, Telecom Italia and Deutsche Telecom launched the Joint Audit Cooperation (JAC) initiative to ensure the compliance with contractual requirements, and a better incorporation of the human rights protection among suppliers and subcontractors, which allows for the CSR audits of suppliers to be pooled according to a shared method. In 2013, the JAC decreed guiding principles to facilitate the sharing of its members’ CSR expectations with the common suppliers.In close cooperation, the operators determine the common suppliers and the subcontractors to be audited, by designating to them a referent Operator who will be responsible for conducting the audit and cover the costs.Then the operating method is set:
  • Audits by international organizations selected on requests for quotation, specialized in CSR. The auditor must speak the language of the audited supplier
  • Confidentiality agreement executed with the supplier to restrict the circulation of the audit results to the JAC’s own members
  • Planned corrective actions, in agreement with suppliers, and controlled by the JAC’s members
 Best Practice spotted by World Forum for a Responsible Economy in 2012 and updated in 2016.

CONTRIBUTION TO COMPANY PERFORMANCE

  • Since 2010, 7 other operators have joined the JAC and 112 audits have been conducted in 15 countries around the world, that is to say 83 plants and more than 400,000 workers
  • Intensified cooperation between Orange and its suppliers
  • 100% of suppliers audited for compliance audits in 2015

Benefits

  • Involved suppliers available for the audit
  • Better working conditions closer to the standards or better control practices applied in Europe, particularly in the Health Safety field, expansion to other operators and suppliers
Workforce
152 000 (2018)
Turnover
41,1 milliards € (2015)
Country
France

ORANGE

78 Rue Olivier de Serres
75000 Paris

www.orange.com

Contact

Alain Dubois, Délégué RSE déploiement et mise en œuvre, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., 06 32 06 41 36

Mise à jour le 22/02/2017

Creative Commons Attribution This work by Réseau Alliances – World Forum Lille is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.