A win for Poole College’s Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC) at the recent SAS Hackathon may be an even bigger victory for potentially millions of apparel manufacturing workers worldwide.
An interdisciplinary team of Poole faculty, NC State graduate students and consultants won in the global industry category for Retail, Consumer Goods & Manufacturing.
SCRC competed for the first time in the annual event, which included 145 teams from universities, government agencies, nonprofits and businesses.
The team, headed by SCRC executive director Rob Handfield, focused on how to grade apparel factory compliance with accepted labor standards. The team used software developer SAS’s cloud-based AI platform Viya to develop a framework of metrics and outcomes for a straightforward solution to evaluate apparel supply chains.
“By making the conditions in factories more transparent, we hope to encourage brands and factories to improve working conditions in global apparel manufacturing facilities,” Handfield says.
Life Changing Improvements
Improvements could transform lives of some of the hundreds of millions of people Handfield estimates work in those facilities, particularly where the SCRC project targets: Bangladesh, China, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
The hackathon project is an extension of the SCRC’s Ethical Apparel Index, which tracks working conditions and other aspects of apparel production.
The SCRC team evaluated wage issues, discrimination, sexual harassment, and factory details such as sanitary restrooms and building exits.
“We developed algorithms that can go through audits, quantify them and give them a score. By publicizing these scores for consumers, they could understand if the garment they were buying complied with labor requirements,” Handfield says.
SCRC research indicates that some consumers would pay more for ethically sourced clothes.
“The issue doesn’t seem to be consumers. It seems to be brands, which are hesitant to show that information. They’re afraid it will impact their sales margins,” says Handfield.
Hackathon teams worked together throughout July. Other SCRC team members were:
- Poole professor and SCRC associate research director Tim Kraft
- Arun Gupta, a Deloitte manager and longtime SCRC adviser
- Rejaul Hasan, an Amazon manager, SCRC consultant and former doctoral student at NC State’s Wilson College of Textiles
- Ishika Gandhi, a computer science graduate student
- Amirreza Fakhrabad and Amir Sadeghi, 2024 graduates of the industrial and systems engineering doctoral program.
For Handfield, the most valuable part of the hackathon was that “We could start to see the visualization of our audits in a graphable format to tell differences by factory and country.”
What Happens Next
The next step is to expand the team’s system to create a database.
“We’re envisioning small- to medium-size brands could utilize our database to search for factories with a good score. And investors could understand which firms and brands are using factories that abide by the law,” Handfield says.
SAS will announce the overall hackathon winner at the SAS Innovate conference in May 2025 in Orlando, Florida.
Whether or not the SCRC team wins it all, the project will benefit from the exposure gained in the hackathon and at the May conference. “I’m hoping there might be some additional support for this project,” Handfield says, “once we show it to more people in the public.”
This post was originally published in Poole College of Management News.
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