Global, the leading sustainability and supply chain platform for the consumer goods industry, today announced that Kathryn Smith has joined the company as Vice President, Human Rights Risk Solutions, leading the social compliance and human rights strategy. Smith most recently served as senior director of human rights and environment at Walmart, where she spent nearly 12 years developing and running programs that set the standard for large-scale supply chain accountability.
Running a responsible global supply chain always requires good data—on the factories a company works with, the labor practices behind the products it sells, and the social risks embedded in every part of its supply chain. For many companies, this information is fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to act on. Sourcing managers, supply chain risk managers, and procurement teams must make high-level decisions without the reliable social insights that their environmental counterparts have had for years. As new regulations roll out, including the EU’s corporate sustainability due diligence directive and expanding restrictions on forced labor imports, the gap between companies with and without social data ready for decision-making is widening.
The world is designed to close this gap. By centralizing and standardizing social data across the supply chain, Global gives sourcing, purchasing, and sustainability teams the decision-ready insights they need to manage risk, meet regulatory requirements, and source with confidence.
In his new role, Smith will have end-to-end responsibility for global social compliance offerings, including the Haig Facilitation Social and Labor module – part of Cascal’s Haig Index developed in collaboration with Worldly-Social Competency at Worldly Axion, and platform development specifically for team sourcing and procurement solutions. A key pillar of this work continues to develop the Hague Facilitation Social and Labor Model in a strategic setting with the Social and Labor Convergence Program Mutual Evaluation Framework, strengthening global commitment to industry standardization and helping brands and suppliers to reduce audit fatigue by identifying as single standard replaces.
Smith will work across product, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer teams to ensure real-world solutions address the real operational challenges her former partners face every day.
“Sourcing and buying teams have long been making critical buying decisions with fragmented, limited social data,” Smith said. “Current and future regulations force this issue, but companies that get ahead of it will have a real competitive advantage, not just a compliance check box. The world is uniquely positioned to integrate environmental and social information in a way that really works for the people who make purchasing decisions. That’s what drew me here.”
