Bridge the Gap
Modern Slavery Gap Analysis Tool by SD Strategies
Take the guesswork out of managing your modern slavery risks.
Our online Bridge the Gap tool enables you to identify gaps in your organisation’s systems and processes that may be increasing your modern slavery risk and impacting your efforts to manage it.
The tool identifies gaps and opportunities for improvement across five key business systems:
- Management systems
- Human resources and recruitment
- Customers and stakeholders
- Procurement and supply chain
- Risk management
Completing a modern slavery gap analysis has multiple benefits for your organisation.
It provides an excellent opportunity to engage your Board or leadership team and increase the commitment (and access to resources) needed to manage modern slavery risks.
It demonstrates commitment to customers, investors and shareholders who want to know that you’re proactively managing modern slavery risks to protect their investment and reputation.
Bridge the Gap provides a significant amount of information to inform your Modern Slavery Statement as required by the Australian Modern Slavery Act and will also support reporting requirements under the UK Modern Slavery Act.
The tool enables you to ‘stress test’ existing risk management systems and processes across your operations and supply chain and helps to identify practical opportunities for improvement.
It facilitates the development of a road map or action plan for identifying, assessing and addressing modern slavery risks – a great value add to any organisation, particularly if you just don’t know where to start.
How does it work?
The online tool is simple and intuitive to use.
Once you have selected a plan and created an account you are presented with 22 separate questions and 88 potential responses about the current status of modern slavery risk management across five key business systems.
Your responses should reflect what you are doing to address modern slavery risks, how risk management is being integrated into existing systems and processes and how you are engaging with key stakeholders and suppliers on the issue.
Once the question set is completed you get an instant visual ‘heat map’ of how effectively your business is managing modern slavery risks within each of the five business areas.
Depending on the plan you have selected, you can choose from 130 practical actions which can be tailored to the needs of your business. The heat map and action plan will help inform your Modern Slavery Statement as required by the Australian Modern Slavery Act and the UK Modern Slavery Act.
Who should complete the tool?
While you can complete the Bridge the Gap analysis individually, we recommend involving people from different areas of your organisation. This enables a wide range of perspectives and knowledge to be captured and the resulting heat map will be more representative of the current state of play for managing modern slavery risk within your organisation.
Key business areas to involve in the modern slavery gap analysis include:
- Executive leadership team representative
- Procurement / supply chain
- Operations
- Human resources
- Legal and compliance
- Audit and risk
- Corporate affairs and communications
- Training and professional development
Alternatively, you can complete the Bridge the Gap tool in a face-to-face facilitated workshop with our highly experienced consultants. This is an effective way to engage your team on the issue and will rapidly accelerate the implementation of your modern slavery program.
Bridge the Gap plans
We offer a range of flexible, cost-effective plans which will help get your modern slavery risk management program off the ground or fine tune what you already have in place.
Features available within each plan vary depending on your organisation’s needs, budget and time frame.
If you are not sure what plan best suits your organisation, please contact us.
Basic Plan
Once you have completed the question set a visual ‘heat map’ is generated. The map highlights gaps using a four colour (Red / Orange / Yellow/ Green) assessment format. You are also provided with a summary of the state-of-play across each of the five business systems.
The heat map and state-of-play summaries can be downloaded as a single PDF report customised with your organisation’s details. If you require more information, or want to develop your action plan online, you can upgrade to a Standard or Premium plan.
Standard Plan
Our Standard plan has all the features of the basic plan plus a list of 130 practical actions to help you address identified gaps and opportunities. The sample actions are based on leading practice for managing modern slavery risk, as well as our own experience working with hundreds of companies and industry sectors for more than 25 years. Our actions are not vague aspirational statements, focusing instead on delivering tangible results that are measurable and achievable.
Once you complete the question set and generated your heat map you will have access to our sample actions. Bridge the Gap gives you absolute flexibility to choose actions that suits the needs and aspirations of your organisation to manage modern slavery risk.
You may wish to develop an initial 12-18 month plan and select high priority actions only (for example, where the heat map shows a Red result). Alternatively, you can go further and create a more comprehensive (2-3 year) plan by choosing actions that address your Orange results too. If continuous improvement or leadership within your sector is your goal, then choose our Green actions also, plus add your own actions into the mix.
Download your actions along with your heat map and state of play summary as a pdf.
If you want to develop your action plan online and download it as a Word document, we recommend upgrading to our Premium plan.
Premium Plan
Our Premium plan has all the features of the basic and standard plans. In addition, selected actions are automatically included in a customised online action planning template. Our Premium plan also has the option of including your own actions using a free-text function. The template enables you to list your actions, identify priorities, define responsibilities and set timeframes for completion.
This advanced functionality can be used individually, in a team environment, or through a facilitated session with our consultants, enabling you to better collaborate with key stakeholders from across your organisation.
Once you have completed your action plan you can download a Word or PDF version. You also have the option of logging back into Bridge the Gap and updating your action plan whenever you want, for no extra cost.