About Avery Dennison
Avery Dennison is a global Fortune 500 manufacturer with operations in 50 countries and approximately 35,000 employees across the world. The company’s products include pressure-sensitive adhesive materials, apparel branding labels and tags, RFID inlays, and specialty medical products. The company serves a range of industries including automotive, pharmaceuticals, logistics, and retail and apparel.
One of Avery Dennison’s top product lines is apparel branding, labels, and tags made from cotton and polyester. These labels and tags are sold to major retail and apparel brands as a component of shirts, sweaters, pants, and other staple consumer products.
The Challenge: Complying With Expansive Forced Labor Regulations, Starting in Europe
Across the globe, governments are putting increasing pressure on businesses to prove that their product value chains aren’t exposed to human rights and forced labor violations. Avery Dennison both produces products made of textiles such as cotton and polyester and chemical mixtures such as ink and supplies product components to retail and apparel brands that are themselves subject to forced labor regulations. As a result, the company also faces an additional imperative from downstream customers to comply with forced labor and human rights regulations.
The Norwegian Transparency Act, which went into effect in 2022, requires large companies selling products and services in Norway to account for human rights fair labor practices in their products’ value chains. Avery Dennison must produce a publicly-available, annual account of supplier due diligence practices and findings. Avery Dennison’s product line in Norway includes apparel labels, adhesives, and other products incorporating ink and other chemicals. The company specializes in manufacturing heat transfers, primarily used to decorate sportswear, workwear, and corporate apparel. The production and manufacturing of certain chemicals have historical exposure to human rights and labor rights violations further up enterprises' product value chains.
"Supply chain means any party in the chain of suppliers and sub-contractors that supplies or produces goods, services or other input factors included in an enterprise’s delivery of services or production of goods from the raw material stage to a finished product."
Norwegian Transparency Act, 2022
The Transparency Act expands the legal definition of suppliers to include “any party in the chain of suppliers and subcontractors that supplies or produces goods, services or other input factors included in an enterprise's delivery of services or production of goods from the raw material stage to a finished product.” For Avery Dennison, compliance with the Transparency Act demands full illumination of upstream and downstream product value chains.
Avery Dennison faced two challenges in complying with the Transparency Act:
- Avery Dennison lacked value chain visibility beyond Tier 1. The company’s existing solutions only offered visibility on Tier 1 suppliers. To comply with the Transparency Act, Avery Dennison needed sub-tier visibility.
- Getting sub-tier value chain visibility would have cost Avery Dennison hundreds of hours of manual value chain mapping: The company’s existing solutions required manual methods to map value chains and screen for sanctions, and could not deliver a dynamic, central source-of-record for suppliers’ compliance history.
The Altana Solution: Sub-Tier Visibility to Screen Suppliers at Scale
To get visibility into sub-tiers of its product value chains and screen suppliers at scale, Avery Dennison turned to Altana.
Avery Dennison’s procurement and sourcing team began using Altana in 2024. To comply with the Norwegian Transparency Act, the Avery Dennison team followed the approach recommended by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), prioritizing evaluation of a number of high-risk suppliers with potential compliance exposure that could ripple broadly throughout the company’s product value chains.
The global procurement team at Avery Dennison trained a supply chain manager in Norway on Altana, which makes it possible to optimize value chains through insights into compliance and resilience risks.
By using Altana, the supply chain manager, along with the procurement and sourcing teams, has full sub-tier visibility into product value chains, and can map suppliers from Tier 1 to Tier N.
Avery Dennison’s team can zoom in on specific product lines and suppliers. Sub-tier suppliers with possible compliance risks are dynamically updated and highlighted in yellow.
With a click, Avery Dennison has additional information about these suppliers, including jurisdiction, factory locations, and a detailed breakdown of their compliance history for hundreds of relevant sanctions. Avery Dennison’s users also see transactions between the suppliers, getting a full, comprehensive view of sub-tier exposure.
The result: Avery Dennison slashed the time and effort required for compliance while improving accuracy and level of detail in the report submitted for the Transparency Act.
The Future: Using Altana to Comply With More Global Regulatory Frameworks, Including EUDR
Having successfully established robust, efficient compliance with the Norwegian Transparency Act, Avery Dennison plans to extend its use of Altana to cover more suppliers, more product value chains, and more of the stringent regulatory requirements affecting its global markets.
- In addition to using Altana to comply with the EUDR and other regulatory frameworks, Avery Dennison is exploring an integration with Altana partner Kharon for more analysis.
By expanding its engagement with Altana, Avery Dennison will ensure proactive compliance for current and future regulations:
- Altana will serve as a central source of truth for value chain information and management.
- Avery Dennison can share value chain information across their network to gather documentation and demonstrate compliance.
- All network collaboration will take place centrally in Altana, and will be performed in the context of specific product value chains.
The end goals: ensuring compliance with a growing body of trade regulations through sub-tier visibility and accurate value chain management, and having a unified, shared source of truth for internal and external stakeholders to operate within.
