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.

Thank you Suvro Dev Saha for your valuable insights!

Interview with Iqbal Kazy

1. Iqbal, could you please introduce yourself and your role at Lindex. 

I am an environmental expert by education and have been working with the textile and readymade garment sector since 2004. I worked in several international organizations and fashion brands during this period. I see the South Asia Fashion industry from different angles and I have a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of this sector.

In Lindex, my role is to drive the company towards sustainable business both with regards to social and environmental activities. I used to develop the capacity of its South Asia supply chain to be more transparent and establish management systems to reduce the environmental impacts from their production processes. I also contribute to the development of sustainability strategies for Lindex.

2. Lindex 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?

From Lindex, we recently published our sustainability promise for future generations where we committed that by 2025, we will have eliminated the release of all hazardous and toxic substances from Lindex supply chain and we will promote transparency and more sustainable chemistry. We started to use BHive as we see that this tool can help us to promote transparency and achieve the goal of removing the release of hazardous chemicals from our supply chain.

3. What has been the experience of The BHive so far? Could you give us a feedback from your experience and feedback from the factories?

It’s really a fantastic experience, most of my factories give me the feedback that it reduces their workload for managing chemical inventory and collecting compliance certificates from the chemical manufacturers. This also help them to track to maintain the stock list.

4. What is the biggest advantage of The BHive?

It is a very simple but useful tool. It creates a good foundation to drive towards transparency in the supply chain. From a brand perspective it reduces the workload of the sustainability team and helps to take necessary improvement plan to phasing out of hazardous chemicals from supply chain.

5. Did you or the factories face any challenges ? Is there any shortcoming?

So far the challenge that me and my supply chain face is that the products of some manufacturers are not registered in the system yet, so the tool did not show the compliance status of those product. For this I think the collaboration from chemical manufacturers is very important and I would like to request them to extend their cooperation so that more products are registered in the system. 

6. What would your recommend to other brands how to start using The BHive?

I believe transparency and sustainability are very difficult drive individually. So, my recommendation to my industry peers is please try this great tool with your key supplier first whom you believe are most open and transparent. Once you will start, you can see the benefits and then will surely have a business case to show to other tier suppliers.

7. What is your vision from Lindex perspective for the future in using The BHive? 

We want to see 100% of Lindex suppliers using this tool to create their chemical inventory, by which we can ensure that they are using better chemistry. In future we would love to see the status of resource efficiency of each product they are using for Lindex production.

Thank you Iqbal Kazy for your valueble insights!