Business requirements
Onboard Brands is a due diligence platform for assessing potential suppliers and making sure their ethical, environmental, and social practices align with the values of retailers who wish to work with them. The company was established by the co-founders of Akojo Market, an eCommerce platform for artisan makers in emerging markets. They wanted to onboard brands as quickly as possible and with complete visibility of their supply chains.
Onboard Brands came to us wanting to build a bespoke platform specifically aimed at their retailers, to ensure that they had complete visibility of the brands that they partner with, making it easier for them to monitor compliance, streamline due diligence and reassure those retailers that the brands they are working with are sustainable and follow ethical practices. The system is designed to be a proof point rather than a comprehensive supply chain auditor to use on a businesses’ own integrated supply chain.
Our solution
Our recommendation was to treat this as a Greenfield Project and to design and build the platform using React.js for the client side and Laravel for the server side. One of the key features we built was a form builder, that each retailer uses, to create different questionnaire types for their brands to answer, in order for them to be accepted to sell their products online. The questionnaire builder provides a question bank from which the retailer can add questions, and a freeform question creation functionality, so the retailers have the flexibility to completely customise their own questionnaire. The system comprises various algorithms, logic and verification APIs which access data published by governments, NGOs and official corporate registries, and are crucial in ensuring that the information given during the onboarding process is honest and valid.
The results
The platform provides an easy-to-use and interactive onboarding portal for users to assess the practices of potential suppliers. Retailers can onboard brands from start to finish, from completing a questionnaire, signing and returning documentation and collecting badges, to accessing support through a built-in ChatBot and receiving feedback on their questionnaire answers. Answers are verified in real time against globally recognised compliance and ethics databases, whilst discrepancies and red flags appear as notifications and retailers can approve or reject brands via the tool.
The finished product
