ESCP speaks to the Chief Finance Officer and Director of CSR & Sustainability at Combine Will about how they are maximising the benefits of ESCP membership since joining in 2004.
Read the branded version of the case study here.
Established in 1992, Combine Will manufacturers toys and premium goods at its five factories across China and Indonesia, all of which are certified under the Ethical Supply Chain Program (ESCP).
Amongst its long-standing clients are The Marketing Store (supplier of McDonald’s Happy Meals toys), Reckitt (which owns several well-known hygiene, health and nutrition brands) and Siku (one of Europe’s leading toy companies).
The company is committed to continuous improvement and has embraced ESCP’s training opportunities for factories, which include in-person and remote sessions, open forums and best practice roundtables, in addition to online resources.
Below, Chief Finance Officer Simon Suen and Director of CSR & Sustainability Gordon Wu discuss some of the sustainable improvements that are enhancing business performance, and how they’re getting the most from their ESCP membership.
Combine Will’s workforce has doubled since 2021, the company now employing 14,000 people. Such growth brings a number of challenges, says Simon: “Whereas in the past we were all about diecast and plastic, we’ve expanded into plush toys and also the paper business. These are new sectors for us, and they bring new operational risks and new regulations to follow.
“Most of our buyers are big names that place a great emphasis on protecting their brand value. Safety is very important for them, in terms of the well-being of those operating machinery, as well as product and end-customer safety.”
So how does a business that’s growing so quickly ensure it meets constantly changing standards?
“With employees joining all the time, communication with our staff is crucial if we’re to ensure we remain compliant,” says Simon. “Building up our internal culture, so that everyone knows what the standards are and how to comply with them, is very important to us.
“This is not easy in the traditional Chinese factory, where many employees are migrant workers who want lots of overtime so they can earn high amounts and then return home. If our staff do not understand the benefits of meeting the required standards, then they’ll leave and join a company that isn’t compliant to earn more money.
“We have to educate them and build a culture that understand the value of worker well-being and meeting industry expectations, we need to demonstrate to our workers that they are better protected and looked after than in other factories.”
ESCP understands that a company’s compliance journey does not simply stop as soon as the auditor leaves, which is why we offer a full range of training and capability-building programs to equip factories with the skills needed to tackle their specific issues.
“We have worked with ESCP’s training team over the past few years, and it’s been extremely valuable,” says Gordon, who is responsible for auditing and compliance at Combine Will’s facility in Guangxi.
“It’s so helpful to have the scope of the training customized to our needs. Our initial priority was to improve workers’ understanding of the detailed requirements around safety, industry standards and occupational health, and why they exist. This was addressed through a training course with more than 100 of our frontline leaders.
“Next, there was a need to increase staff knowledge on wage calculations, working hours requirements, and avoiding child labor recruitment; also, processes to cut out the human error that can lead to inconsistencies between the actual working hours and the records. We held an ESCP session, not just for the HR team but for team leaders in departments such as Production and Quality Control, who are now able to confidently answer employees’ questions and incorporate their learning into day-to-day operations.
“ESCP has a practical approach, and the way they work together with us ensures we can fulfil our production requirements and meet our Code of Conduct obligations at the same time.
“There are also resources that we can download, which builds up our capacity. These also enable the training to be carried out online via videos, so there's no limit on participant numbers. I can ask team members from our five factories, all of which are in different places, to take part. This reduces my workload a lot.”
“If we didn’t have ESCP supporting us and providing guidance with very clear instructions on how to comply with the regulations, we would need to employ further staff to do that job.”
How does Combine Will know that the training has worked?
Gordon wastes no time in answering: “There’s an examination after the training to make sure the frontline leaders and workers understand all the key points. We then conduct an internal audit several weeks later, to check that staff really have effectively tackled the problems we were facing.
“We used to have the same issues repeated over and over, whether that was blocked fire exits or workers not receiving their health check-ups. Now that everyone knows what they are doing and why they are doing it, we don’t need to worry about seeing such issues time after time.
“Importantly we are not nervous when auditors arrive at our factories. We are confident in our systems and processes which we designed to always maintain compliance and not just when an audit is expected. We are happy to open our doors and welcome the auditors at any time.
“We’re also saving a lot of money by being able to show our ESCP certificate and audit report to all of our customers as evidence of our performance, instead of having to carry out separate audits for each client, which might cost us 20,000 Chinese Yuan [around US$ 3,000] per audit.”
The impact of ESCP training programs is “amazing”, says Simon, who adds: “Our employee count is increasing, but the number of work-related injuries is continuing to drop – from 0.85 per million man-hours in 2021, to 0.12 in 2023, a decrease of over 85%.
“Not only that, but ESCP is providing a very transparent record of our training hours for our clients, the public and our workers which we share in our ESG and sustainability reports.”
We’re delighted that Combine Will is making full use of ESCP’s industry experience to help us develop the sort of working environment which resulted in us winning HR Asia’s ‘Best Company to Work for in Asia 2024’ as well as receiving the ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award 2024’.
“ESCP is a trustworthy and innovative partner,” concludes Simon. “They are the foundation of our company’s ESG strategy and also the foundation of our Worker Well-Being culture. Being a member of the program is very important for us.”
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