Interview with Suvro Dev Saha
/1. Suvro, could you please introduce yourself and your role at Bay City?
First of all, thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts on The BHive. My name is Suvro Dev Saha. At Bay City I own the position of Manager for Environment and Sustainable Production at Global Apparel GmbH. Global Apparel is the local liaison office in Bangladesh for Bay City Textilhandels GmbH. In this position, I am responsible for supervising and coordinating the daily activity of all environmental work. This includes ensuring RSL and MRSL conformity, as well as supply chain traceability.
2. Bay City has started to use The BHive. Could you explain the motivation behind why you started to use it? What do you want to achieve with it and why?
Bay City has a strong commitment to ensure our clients’ MRSL requirements are met. Each and every order is checked to see if it meets both legal conformities and brand requirements; we also work with requirements from various certification bodies. The interconnectivity of The BHive helps us to ensure necessary transparency, and to simplify communication with our supply chain partners.
3. What has been the experience of using The BHive so far? Could you give us feedback from your experience and feedback from the factories?
The BHive has definitely optimized the interconnection with our factories, saving us workload through reducing the necessity of factory visits. Factories benefit as well, since they have one platform for preparing and sharing their inventories for various brand clients. They also do not have to manually insert the information on the chemical products they use into excel sheets anymore – the availability of chemical data through The BHive saves a lot of time here. For the factory the system also poses as a great management system for chemical data, since they can upload all relevant documents in the document center.
4. What is the biggest advantage of The BHive?
Of course, the databank is one great part of The BHive that pushes efficiency for both factories and brands. In my eyes, the biggest advantage is definitely the possibility to eliminate human errors, since the data is already in the system. And since the technology is based on real-time computing, we as a brand have instant access to the factories’ inventories – and we can instantly check what is actually in stock in the factories. Plus, it is a very economical system, making it available for both brands and factories of all sizes.
5. Did you or the factories face any challenges? Is there any shortcoming?
One thing we often encounter in Bangladesh are infrastructural challenges, such as a slow internet connection, which can be time-consuming.
6. What would you recommend to other brands considering using The BHive?
Whoever uses The BHive will experience the great advantages of more transparency. Since not everybody has a high confidence, I think it is important to start with your open key suppliers and work closely together with them. It will strengthen the relationship, and then financial benefits from using The BHive will follow. And since it can be tested for free, there is nothing to lose.
7. What is your vision from a Bay City perspective for the future in using The BHive?
Bay City’s corporate parent, Schmidt Group GmbH, is planning to expand BHive more into the entire supply chain.