|
Environmental Stewardship
Supplier Code of Conduct
Agilent's Supplier Code of Conduct addresses our environmental and sustainability focus as well as support of human rights and anticorruption practices within Agilent's supply chain. Agilent's relationships with suppliers are of great strategic importance. Common sense, good judgment and the highest standards of integrity will be used in working with our suppliers. The results Agilent Technologies seeks will not occur from random sourcing or from selecting suppliers solely based on competitive quotations. It will result from making the correct selection of suppliers, then working closely with them in specific areas to improve quality and productivity. The basic strategy for establishing these "working relationships" is through setting mutual performance expectations and measures, feeding back the results, initiating corrective actions to ensure continuous performance improvements and over time, rewarding the best with the opportunity for more business through new R&D products and product transfers.
Environment Health and Safety and Social Responsibility
Agilent's Corporate Citizenship Objective is to be an economic, intellectual and social asset in each nation and community in which we do business. In support of this objective, Agilent maintains company-wide policies that address environment and sustainability, and occupational health and safety. Our Standards of Business Conduct clarify the extension of our values to our suppliers. It states that we will not establish or maintain a business relationship with a supplier if we believe that its practices violate local laws or basic international principles relating to labor standards or environmental protection.
To confirm our commitments and clarify our expectations, in 2004 Agilent developed the Supplier Environmental Social Responsibility (ESR) Code of Conduct. During the supplier-sourcing process, potential suppliers are made aware of Agilent's Supplier ESR Code of Conduct. We communicate to our suppliers our ESR expectations and require them to adopt sound environmental, health-and-safety management practices aligned with these expectations. To help ensure that the principles within our Code of Conduct are understood globally, we incorporate eight International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions that have been identified as being fundamental to the rights of human beings at work. These conventions are supported by many organizations around the world and form the basis of Agilent's Human Rights Policy
http://jobs.agilent.com/who_we_are/rightsandpolicy.html.
To ensure compliance with our Supplier ESR Code of Conduct, Agilent surveys direct-material suppliers representing the highest potential environmental and social responsibility risk. Through an independent third party, an onsite survey is conducted in three critical areas:
- Adoption of sound environmental, health and safety, and social responsibility management practices.
- Demonstrated conformance with applicable environmental, health and safety laws and regulations, and basic international principles relating to labor standards and environmental protection.
- Demonstrated compliance with international restrictions that apply to the chemical content of components that are incorporated into Agilent products. In addition, supplier exhibits product compliance to the current version of Agilent's General Specification for the Environment (GSE).
In those cases where areas of improvement are identified by the third-party auditor, Agilent works closely with the supplier to ensure a corrective action plan is developed and executed. The third-party auditor will verify the corrective action plan has been completed. In 2010, 15 high-risk supplier site surveys were successfully conducted. In addition, Agilent in 2010 instituted a new audit program to monitor all printed circuit assembly (PCA) suppliers for compliance with ozone-depleting compound regulations. Compliance and verification was done by an independent third party and no issues were uncovered. Both of these programs underscore Agilent's commitment to ensuring our supply chain is in conformance with sound environmental, health and safety, and social responsibility practices.
|