Responsible business conduct to ensure good collaboration with suppliers

At Boehringer Ingelheim, our Values and Principles have always provided the foundation for our success. We believe that society and business are best served by responsible business conduct and practices.

Boehringer Ingelheim expects both our suppliers and our colleagues to make a commitment to exemplary ethical and professional conduct, as they are all an integral part of our commitment to success. In order to ensure that the suppliers know and follow our Values and Principles, we have developed a Supplier Code of Conduct (SuCoC). The SuCoC provides a consistent, minimum guidelines for supplier behaviour and communicates what we expect of our suppliers: They should conduct their business in an ethical manner, act with integrity, ensure health and safe working conditions and respect human rights and the environment. Our SuCoC is also based upon the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative’s (PSCI) Pharmaceutical Industry Principles, the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact and the Responsible Care® Initiative (https://www.icca-chem.org/responsible-care/). 

By working with our suppliers to promote responsible conduct, we aim to minimize risks and create stable, long term relationships. For this reason, when we source from suppliers, we do not focus solely on the typical priorities, such as quality, cost and delivery, but rather we strive to select business partners who share our social and environmental values and acknowledge our safety culture as described in our SuCoC. These factors are playing an increasing role during the supplier on-boarding, selection and qualification, including risk-based Environmental Health and Safety and Sustainability (EHS&S) audits and assesments.  

For conducting these assessments, we use an external available platform who performs corporate social responsibility (CSR) assessments of the companies: ECOVADIS (https://www.ecovadis.com/es/). The audits to suppliers are perfomed aligned to the PSCI protocol https://pscinitiative.org/auditCollaboration and https://pscinitiative.org/resource?resource=3

We expect contractors and other third parties working at our premises to meet our EHS&S standards. Contractors have to ensure and demonstrate that they are in full compliance with all applicable laws, rules and regulations. In addition, they must comply with all site-specific EHS&S requirements and ensure that their employees and subcontractors are trained in line with Boehringer Ingelheim EHS&S procedures and standards.