Man and woman measuring cloth for the production of clothing at an apparel factory.

FairCapacity Platform

Connecting Buyers & Suppliers

Part of SAI’s FairCapacity Program in Bangladesh and India, the FairCapacity Platform seeks to aid suppliers with their production capacity measurement and planning, encourage responsible subcontracting, and help forge better buyer-supplier relationships. The Platform connects buyers and suppliers, giving buyers greater visibility into their supply chains and rewarding responsible suppliers with access to buyers. It includes the FairCapacity Calculator and a mechanism for improving capacity measurement and forecasting practices. Buyers and suppliers are now able to register for the platform and use the available features.

The Issue

In today’s global apparel industry, factory managers often have to sacrifice worker safety and wellbeing to fill orders and meet deadlines. Common measures include:

scheduling excessive overtime non-payment of overtime wages
hiring more workers than they can safely accommodate
and subcontracting to unauthorized and under-regulated facilities.

Poor measurement and forecasting practices for factory capacity contribute to these problems. Managers measure their production capacity using calculations that only account for a small number of relevant metrics. They often ignore common capacity disruptions like worker absenteeism, supply delays, and production bottlenecks, resulting in inaccurate capacity measurements and unrealistic production targets.

FairCapacity — Connecting Buyers & Suppliers in New Ways

FairCapacity aims to address these problems through a comprehensive program to quantify the impacts of purchasing practices on supplier production capacity, improve supplier production capacity calculations, and improve labor performance. Using sixteen different indicators, including average order size, average number of working hours, and machine breakdown rate, FairCapacity will assist suppliers in predicting production capacity and to help reduce the risk that they turn to practices like excessive overtime and unauthorized subcontracting – in turn, providing greater transparency throughout the supply chain.