Responsible sourcing
To embed corporate responsibility throughout our business, Ericsson works to manage the impact of social, ethical, environmental, and human rights issues on our supply chain. A fundamental part of this approach is in building the capacity for our suppliers to meet high standards in all of these areas.
The sustainable management of supply chains is important to our stakeholders, including Ericsson’s customers and investors. For many years, we have set social and environmental requirements for our suppliers to help to achieve our supply chain goals. We will continue to cooperate with suppliers in these areas, increasing our engagements in strategic areas to further improve sustainable capabilities in the supply chain.
You can find our supplier requirements, ongoing program areas and results, and trainings available for external parties in the material below. All program areas have an appointed manager from Ericsson’s Responsible Sourcing team.
Governance
The scope of the Responsible Sourcing program mirrors the topics covered in the Code of Conduct. Appointed program managers drive and implement initiatives through networking within the line organizations. This work is aligned with the Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility strategy and is an integrated part of the supply chain strategy. Supplier adherence to standards and requirements is verified through two audit programs, one based on the Code of Conduct and the other on Contract Compliance.
Supplier requirements
The sustainable management of supply chains is of growing importance to our stakeholders, including customers and investors. Our current requirements for suppliers are included in our requirement documents.
Explore our supplier requirements and sourcing conditions.
Due Diligence
Ericsson has many thousands of suppliers, and it is not possible to audit them all. In order to identify the most critical ones, in a Code of Conduct and Contract Compliance perspective, a supplier risk assessment is performed. A common risk matrix is used and this ensures a consistent approach. Suppliers that are considered high risk for human rights, environment or OHS areas are screened via a 3rd party ESG data feeder or directly via a questionnaire. Suppliers will be rated as High, Medium or Low Risk’ depending on how well they meet Ericsson’s requirements. Based on this rating, the Compliance Specialist team will issue, with the support of Responsible Sourcing, a recommendation to onboard, not to onboard or onboard with conditions to the Sourcing Manager. In the case a supplier is onboarded with conditions, Sourcing Managers have the responsibility of ensuring those conditions are met in the agreed timeframes or escalate the case to Sourcing Board if not.