Amer Sports collaborates with Sourcemap on traceability

Amer Sports, the parent company of renowned international sports and outdoor brands like Arc’teryx, Salomon, Wilson, and others, has partners with Sourcemap, a global provider of supply chain transparency and traceability software, to track and trace crucial commodities like cotton and viscose, also known as rayon.

In order to gather transaction certificates for certified materials and independently verify the company’s and its subsidiaries’ entire chain of custody, from raw materials to finished goods, across its supply chain spanning five continents, Amer Sports will use Sourcemap’s full-suite supply chain transparency solution.

Cotton and viscose, two major raw materials for every day and activewear throughout the textile industry, travel through a number of intermediary steps before reaching shop shelves from the farm or forest where they are produced. It is often expensive and technically challenging to properly examine and control how and where these materials move through ginners, merchants, fabric mills, sewers, and other intermediates. Less than 20% of apparel businesses polled by KPMG claimed to have complete visibility into their supply chains, despite laws like the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act requiring importers to verify beyond a reasonable doubt where their cotton and viscose are from.

World-class sporting goods and outdoor gear are developed, produced, and sold by Amer Sports brands like Arc’teryx, Salomon, Peak Performance, Atomic, Wilson, Armada, ENVE Composites, Louisville Slugger, and DeMarini. Amer Sports uses real-time commodity mapping to assure material compliance because its supply chains are so intricate.

Pascal Covatta, VP of Global Sourcing at Amer Sports, said that customer satisfaction is one of their key concerns, and they achieve this when they create comprehensive transparency and compliance with local and international standards inside their whole supply chain. In order to meet these consumer needs and regulatory expectations for their end-to-end supply chain transparency, Sourcemap is a crucial partner for them.

The supplier discovery process, developed by Sourcemap, links direct and indirect suppliers, sites, shipping lanes, and transactions to create a current graph of all worldwide operations. Since becoming a customer, Amer Sports has already used Sourcemap’s supplier discovery program for one of its key commodities: cotton, identifying upstream suppliers from farms to mills to factories within its supply chain. Customers of Sourcemap typically find more than 10,000 suppliers during the process.

Unlike its competitors, Sourcemap provides a customised certification methodology that ensures brand protection and legitimacy at every stage of the supply chain. Sourcemap’s certification procedures include multi-brand, multi-certification, and multi-commodity, guaranteeing that every link in the value chain is checked while thoroughly collecting an audit trail of evidence for upcoming reporting. Amer Sports is able to manage its complex supply chains with end-to-end insight into the full value chain by employing Sourcemap’s certification procedure, which is a necessary task to stay compliant and competitive.

Leo Bonanni, CEO & founder of Sourcemap, said that they would continue to see forward-thinking brands like Amer Sports, with complex supply chains that span nearly every corner of the world, move beyond legacy mapping systems. Traceability and transparency are becoming more and more important components of successful business planning as multinational corporations seek to develop robust supply chains. Sourcemap is essential for keeping businesses in all industries one step ahead.