Dealers And Suppliers
For automotive manufacturers, the existence of a well-developed value chain is crucial for consistency, quality, efficiency and customer satisfaction. Our distributors and suppliers play a crucial role in our broad value chain, and thus, for a sustainable business model we constantly contribute to enhancing the business success of our dealers and suppliers.
We encourage our suppliers to develop systems and practices in primary sustainability fields such as quality, efficiency, human rights, working environment and environmental performance. We include these expectations in our purchasing agreements and actively monitor their compliance. We do not tolerate any working practices such as forced, unpaid or child labour, and expect our suppliers and partners to internalise the same approach to the principles of human rights in all of their operations. We include these principles as part of the service and investment agreements we sign with suppliers and partners to serve as a guarantee. Similarly, we give constant training in human rights, social ethics and issues regarding work life to all of our suppliers.
Just as with our suppliers, so too do we value the success of our dealers and authorised services. We aim to contribute to the technical strength, capacity, and knowledge of our dealers through specially-designed training opportunities. At regular intervals, we also ask for their own views and ideas, in order that we can improve our own practices accordingly.
With the aim of increasing the energy efficiency of our dealers and meeting the energy of the vehicles and the energy of our dealers within the scope of electric vehicle transformation; as 2022 we have completed solar energy panel investments in 11 of our dealers and complated in most of our dealers the transition to energy saving LED lighting systems and the transition to energy and heat-saving glasses.
The Supplier Sustainability Assessment and Development Program, which will support our long-term sustainability goals, was implemented by Ford Otosan Purchasing Leadership in 2022. Supplier sustainability training, assessments and audits were carried out with a third-party independent audit firm. Pilot sustainability assessments are conducted on 233 tier-1 suppliers, of which 18 were categorized as critical suppliers. Evaluation questions include questions on Labor, Health and Safety, Environment, Ethics, Management Systems.
By expanding our supplier sustainability assessment question set in 2023, we also increased the number of suppliers included in the assessment. We have audited a total of 250 suppliers, 40 of which are critical suppliers. In addition to the self-assessment questionnaire, we also included environmental, energy, greenhouse gas and conflict minerals data monitoring forms in the assessment process. In addition, we added new questions to our detailed business ethics audit on critical suppliers, based on the GRI reporting standard and global sustainability indices, on labor, health and safety, environment, ethics and management systems. Child labour issues are also covered in these assessments.
Our independent audit firm uses a specific methodology based on international SEDEX, SMETA, BSCI, and RBA standards in supplier sustainability assessments.
At the Supplier Sustainability Workshop we organized in November 2023, we set goals with our critical suppliers under the scope of Environmental, Social, Governance and Supply Chain, covering all areas of sustainability, which are committed to be realized in 6 months, 1 year and 2 years. These include items such as establishing an ethics hotline, establishing a sustainability governance model, appointing a sustainability leader, and publishing the CDP report and etc.
In the Supplier Sustainability Committee meetings, which we started in 2024, we come together with our critical suppliers to discuss action plans regarding the road map, encourage our suppliers to share their good practices, and provide trainings in their development areas with experts outside the company as well as our corporate knowledge sharing.