From our earliest days, Assent Compliance has been pioneering new and better ways to gather supply chain compliance and sustainability data and make it usable.
Today I’m proud to say we are officially shortening our name to Assent. It’s more than a name change. It’s a commitment to go deeper than any other company in this space, as the leading supply chain sustainability management company.
Assent’s single-minded focus on complex manufacturing companies — businesses like those in the electronics, medical devices, and aerospace and defense equipment spaces with supply chains that consist of countless parts and suppliers — means we understand the unique challenges these companies face.
Compliance Is Evolving; So Are We
In our view, compliance is the indispensable foundation of any successful supply chain sustainability program.
That’s why Assent now has a deep portfolio of product compliance, trade compliance, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) supply chain sustainability management solutions to help our customers shrink business risk and drive sustainable growth. We’re providing the improved access to data, rapid transparency, expert guidance, and detailed, comprehensive reporting that our customers need.
While compliance is as important as ever, it’s also only a piece of the greater sustainability puzzle. For true supply chain sustainability, products must be safe, environmentally friendly, and ethically sourced and manufactured, and manufacturers must know what’s in their products. We’re committed to making that happen, changing the way companies look at sustainability, and the market is responding.
When I joined Assent in 2014, it was embryonic. We had the vision and passion necessary to transform the way the world’s biggest manufacturers looked at compliance, but we knew it would take years of hard work. We did the work, built a remarkable team, and helped change compliance forever. Our goal then was the same as it is now, to help companies see deeper, be smarter, and grow better; we’ve just expanded our scope. We’re helping build trust throughout business relationships through transparency and depth. We’re about helping our clients stand out as supply chain sustainability leaders and getting their products to new markets.
Complex Manufacturers Face Unique Sustainability Challenges
While sustainability is a challenge for any company, managing it is toughest for complex manufacturers. Most complex manufacturing supply chains were never built with sustainability in mind:
- Extended global supply chains provide little to no transparency
- Regulations and standards constantly change and increase expectations
- Materiality differs by manufacturing industry
- Constant demand for innovation
- Long product development cycles make redesign costly
- Changing suppliers/parts is difficult
- Aftermarket extends life of a product
- Responsibility for sustainability is fragmented across the enterprise
- Data is siloed, dirty, stale, and often superficial — and in as many as 50 different languages
- Increasing investor pressure on ESG and sustainability
- Increasing customer demands for sustainability
- Market access is key to growth, but you can’t grow where you can’t go
Complex manufacturers need to know what’s in thousands of parts from hundreds of different suppliers, from smelters in Uganda to looms in Vietnam, and beyond. They need to understand who made the parts and products and the conditions in which they worked. They need to be able to report on this to governments, customers, investors, and a range of other stakeholders. They need to be confident in that reporting.
Manufacturers evaluate sustainability risk within internal operations, but often not for their extended supply chain. As a result, the number one business risk for complex manufacturers is hidden. At least 84 percent of businesses still do not have visibility into their supply chain risks while outsourcing the majority of their production. Hidden risks are costly, both for business and for the world.
Accountability in Supply Chains
Accountability isn’t new to the corporate world. Every major company has a financial system that helps keep the books in order. But what about non-financial accountability? The Assent Sustainability Network contains millions of parts and thousands of suppliers, and it’s growing every day. We provide a defensible system of record for supply chain sustainability that keeps your compliance and ESG books in order — exactly what regulators, investors, and industry leaders are demanding.
Compliance & Supply Chain Sustainability
What is sustainability? It’s not just greenhouse gas emissions or how you power your factories — it’s about the complete environmental and human impact of your products. No one cares about your carbon footprint if your products are causing cancer.
Compliance data — if it is sufficiently clean and deep — is the best available data source about what is in your supply chain. Simply put, without accurate compliance data, defensible ESG reporting will remain out of reach, and managing sustainability as a matter of course will never be possible.
Our proven compliance solutions are expanding to drive deeper insights for ESG programs and help companies keep pace with rapidly changing trends and expectations. But you can’t build an ESG program without a strong compliance foundation.
The Manufacturing Genome
We work to map the entire Manufacturing Genome — the ever-expanding network of suppliers, parts, and parts of parts that makes up global manufacturing supply chains.
We’ve already mapped millions of pieces of information, down to the parts of parts, or atomic level. This gives companies data from deep within their supply chains, where risks are often hidden from ordinary due diligence. With deeper data comes better insights, more proof of sustainable and responsible practices, defensible audits, and ultimately less risk to companies, the environment, and the people we all serve.
Assent Compliance has become Assent Inc., but we’re not shifting away from compliance as an imperative. Far from it!
The supply chains of complex manufacturers weren’t built with sustainability in mind, but they aren’t broken. They just need to evolve. We’re here to help make that happen.
If you have any questions about Assent, supply chain sustainability, or Assent’s Supply Chain Sustainability Platform, please Contact us.
