A secure portal enables Slave-Free Alliance members to work towards a slave-free supply chain

It’s a salutary statistic: 77% companies can expect to find modern slavery in their supply chain. Despite their best intentions, they simply don’t know their supply chain well-enough to know if they’re staffing their businesses in an ethical fashion.

The Slave Free Alliance (SFA) is on a mission to help businesses tackle this huge issue. At its heart it's a membership scheme run by Hope For Justice. It helps businesses protect and enhance their reputations and improve the quality of the products and services they offer. Member companies who hold the ‘anti slavery mark’ are able to demonstrate their commitment to protecting people who work with, and for them, from exploitation.

As long time supporters of Hope For Justice, Fluent were proud to be asked to collaborate on SFA from its inception.

SFA have trained staff who work with businesses of all sizes to formulate an action plan for combatting slavery in the supply chain - from formulating a Modern Slavery Statement to training staff. They asked Fluent to build a members portal that allows SFA staff to create a custom action plan for each member and monitor their progress through that plan.

Due to the highly sensitive nature of the information being submitted, it was crucial for SFA to be able to protect that information with secure user login procedures, including industry standard two-factor authentication (2FA).

2FA is a method of confirming users' claimed identities by using a combination of two different factors - in this case, combining something only known by them (a password) with something only owned by them (a mobile phone).

To have both members and admins requiring 2FA is fairly unique scenario - and certainly something we’d never tried in Umbraco before. So the challenge for our developer was how to get Authy (our app of choice for this) working in both areas together.

You can read more about the nitty gritty technical stuff in this blog post.

Once successfully logged in (using 2FA, naturally) members can plot their progress against a defined set of action plan “tasks”.

We custom-built a back-office section in Umbraco to allow SFA staff to create action plans. Here, they can draw on existing ‘stock’ content or even create new categories and tasks for completion by a specific date.

It’s still early days, but some big names are already on board and turning a potential business risk into ethical best practice.