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• Monitoring and engagement

Corporate Responsibility Report 2008

Monitoring and engagement

• Approach
• Performance

In order to maintain GSK standards in our supply chain, we routinely interact with our suppliers through reviews and follow-up visits by procurement, quality and EHS staff. We consider EHS and human rights issues in all these interactions.

We hold global and regional supplier review meetings where senior GSK managers interact with suppliers on key issues. We provide contract manufacturers with information on the EHS risks associated with the GSK materials they are producing or handling. Our supplier booklet won working with GSK includes our ethics policies and requirements.

We conduct regular EHS audits of critical suppliers of pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare products. We focus on the 150 higher-risk suppliers. Supplier facilities are evaluated against our EHS standards and must achieve a score of at least 50 per cent against these standards to demonstrate acceptable performance and to support continuing supply arrangements. Suppliers develop improvement plans based on the audit findings and we follow up to monitor progress against these plans.

Read a case study on how we helped a supplier to improve its EHS performance in 2008.

We will provide feedback to suppliers if we identify any issues through the questions relating to human rights . We will require corrective action if the issues present a potential breach of the human rights clause included in supplier contracts.

Suppliers of promotional items

Many of the gift items for our Indian business are sourced from within India in an industry with a higher risk of the use of child labour.

We conduct unannounced spot checks for these suppliers, often during the night. These focus on maintaining quality standards but are also used to check that suppliers are not using child labour. The spot checks are conducted by GSK procurement and regional sales staff.

We have used the findings from the programme in India to inform our promotional supplier qualification process in other regions. We have begun to conduct more detailed inspection of assembly sites where possible and have added extra checks in regions where child labour is more common.

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