Enhancing Interoperability: Open Supply Hub collaboration

Currently, your business has a lot to juggle when it comes to managing your value chain impact, and changing regulations are only adding to your plate. Emerging due diligence policies such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the SEC’s Sustainability Reporting rule will require businesses, especially those in the apparel sector, to collect trusted data and start reporting more uniformly. Keeping data interoperability simple will be essential.

Gathering data from across your operations is no small task, and while many businesses have made noteworthy progress on environmental and social impact, inconsistent, messy data has blocked businesses’ ability to effectively track improvements. As you start to run increasingly complex, multi-pronged sustainability programs in response to new legislation, we recognize that quality data and sharing capabilities across platforms must be equally as sophisticated. From manufacturers to shippers and retailers, at every step in the value chain, your company needs best in class intelligence that can be used efficiently across systems.

Higg and the Open Supply Hub (OSH) are working together to help you streamline these efforts. We believe standardized frameworks aren’t just good for the industry – they’re going to make work easier for sustainability professionals, with data that flows together seamlessly, updating automatically across platforms.

Brands and manufacturers use Higg as the single system to manage and report on holistic impact. As more facilities complete assessments and share them with multiple brands, more brands in turn use our platform to measure and manage impact, continuously expanding industry improvements. At the same time, the OSH is working to map all of the world’s apparel facilities in an open database, while also standardizing how facility data is disclosed. The OSH’s unique factory IDs serve as a central source of truth alongside facility location information, allowing stakeholders across the apparel sector to easily identify facilities and which organizations are connected to them. As a free, public registry, the OSH has become a vital tool for corporate supply chain disclosure and supports data interoperability.

“Your business has unique sustainability goals and needs, and Higg and the OSH are creating standardized approaches that help you gather consistent, quality data at every step in the value chain. Together, we are helping the consumer goods industry achieve interoperability,” explains Jason Kibbey, Higg CEO.

Because the two systems are integrated via an API, every time a facility creates a profile on Higg, they can automatically link their OSH ID. Whenever one side updates with new data, the other will have access to the same updated information. Users get the system-level value of both platforms, which then ripples out to all value chain stakeholders trying to measure their own impact. Creating systems that drive easy data interoperability is at the center of our sustainability software solutions.

“We know there are stakeholders throughout apparel supply chains who want to bring about the collaboration our sector so desperately needs, but inconsistency in data across platforms is blocking them. By creating solutions in service of interoperability, we are working to eliminate those blocks and enable that collaboration,” says Natalie Grillon, Executive Director of the OSH.

Through industry-adopted methods — the OSH’s facility IDs and Higg’s standardized framework for measuring impact — we are uniformly accelerating value chain transparency and environmental and social progress. By bringing your business’s datasets together and building on existing technologies, we are working toward creating an ecosystem of data that brands, retailers and manufacturers can use to collaboratively move the sector forward. Learn more about using Higg and the OSH today to improve data interoperability.