Pell Technologies 
Pell Technologies was a midsize but growing technology company that recently went public. It offered a variety of wearable technologies such as activity monitors and music players as well as high performance sports trackers like GPS watches and heart rate monitors. While Pell Technologies was a growing player in the performance wearables, it had developed its supply chain at such a fast rate to keep up with competitors that it had little insight into its suppliers. Suppliers were selected on cost, capacity, efficiency, and quality. For the early years of its operations starting in 2007, Pell had little or no incidents. But in 2009, one of Pell’s major suppliers in Taiwan was experiencing labor issues. The supplier had rapid employee turnover and some employees had even threatened suicide. In 2010, several employees did commit suicide over productivity pressure and poor conditions. The event was all over the news and social media for weeks. Pell had to scramble to make good on their supply chain practices, because they were being held responsible for practices at their suppliers. 

To deal with the firestorm of the supplier issue, Pell put out a series of statements about their concern for their supplier’s labor conditions and suicides. Their stock price dipped for a few days and their shareholders began to get nervous. Pell’s consumer hot line was full of questions about labor conditions at Pell’s contract manufacturers. Eventually the commotion died down and operations resumed to normal along with their stock price. While the buzz was quiet for the moment, Pell knew that it wasn’t the last they would hear about conditions at supplier plants. Not only did they know little about their Taiwan based contract manufacturer, they knew hardly anything about their smaller suppliers, much less Tier 2 suppliers and beyond. That same year, the SEC Dodd-Frank Regulation was announced and placed additional pressure on Pell to act.