Bamboo Rose Blog | Retail News
Focus on UFLPA Prompts Retailers and Brands to Reassess Sourcing Tech Strategies
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) is the latest piece of legislation requiring retailers and brands to take a serious look at the transparency of their sourcing and supply chain partner ecosystems. In September, Robert Silvers, undersecretary for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told the Wall Street Journal, “Compliance professionals—and, indeed, C-suite executives—need to understand that forced labor is now a top-tier compliance issue.”

 

The UFLPA represents the latest in a string of global regulations that push Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) compliance towards the same level of severity as anticorruption and global sanctions compliance. Other regulations impacting retailer and brand supply chain strategies include the European Commission’s Product Passport legislation and the pending New York State Fashion Sustainability Act.

 

The UFPLA officially went into effect in June 2022 and as of September 20th, the DHS had targeted 1,452 cargo entries valued at $429 million. The legislation has ramifications across product categories and industries as the DHS has indicated a focus on cotton, tomatoes, and polysilicon-based products that are commonly exported from the Xinjiang region of China.

 

The UFPLA as well as other ESG regulations will have a direct impact on retailer and brand sourcing and supply chain strategies as well as their technology roadmaps. A mix of tariffs, factory shutdowns, supply chain delays, and geopolitical conflict have all pushed retailer supply chain leaders to look more critically at supplier diversification efforts – decreasing reliance on Chinese suppliers and ramping up partnerships in other Asian and nearshore geographies. On the technology side, retailers and brands realize their current landscape of disconnected systems and processes are poorly positioned to manage and maintain supplier compliance in fast-changing regulatory environments and fail to account for the complex, multilayered supply chain ecosystems that most retailers manage.

 

The Bamboo Rose Multi-Enterprise Platform is architected to support major retailers and brands as they mature and extend the transparency of their supply chain to keep pace with fast-changing business and regulatory environments. Clients can manage their supplier base and extended partner community against business, quality, compliance, and ESG KPIs while also improving visibility between partners to meet mutually beneficial business goals. Clients have leveraged denied party screening content streamed into the Bamboo Rose Global Trade Management application to ensure they’re working with partners who are compliant with the retailer’s target selling markets.

 

In Gartner’s recent Global Trade Management Market Guide, the analyst firm highlighted Bamboo Rose’s experience supporting compliance via supplier management libraries, denied party screening lists, and CTPAT certification and audit checks. Within the same global trade application, clients can also manage supplier performance, global trade logistics, and forecast the estimated landed cost of goods – reducing risk, accelerating time to market, and improving margins within a single system.

 

To learn more about Bamboo Rose supplier management, global trade, and ESG compliance capabilities schedule a meeting with one of our industry experts today.

 

And if you’d like more information on this topic, please check out our on-demand webinar: ESG Transformation Takes the Entire Retail Community.