The tragic Rana Plaza building collapse in 2013 revealed to the world how little many global brands knew about where their products were being made. Following the disaster, demand for supply chain disclosure in the apparel sector was heightened. However, in response to these calls for greater transparency, supply chain disclosure has been inconsistent, inaccessible, of poor and varied quality, and stored in siloed databases. The Open Apparel Registry (OAR) was built to address all these data challenges. At its heart, the OAR exists to drive improvements in data quality for the benefit of all stakeholders in the apparel sector. Powered by a sophisticated name- and- address-matching algorithm, the tool creates one common, open registry of global facility names and addresses, with an industry standard facility ID.
Join us to learn more about the challenges facing the apparel sector, including low levels of technical exposure and understanding of open data; collaborative work that’s being done to educate the sector on the power of open data, including the launch of the Open Data Standard for the Apparel Sector (ODSAS), and examples of how data from the Open Apparel Registry being freely shared and used is creating meaningful changes in the lives of some of global society’s most oppressed people. |