compliance at ledvance

Compliance is a central function at LEDVANCE and acts as an anchor for our Sustainability Strategy. This is also reflected by the fact that compliance and sustainability are often managed by the same person in our areas of business. Every single employee has a responsibility for promoting a culture of compliance and upholding the company’s core values. Managers have additional responsibilities, such as regularly emphasizing the importance of compliance andintegrity, making them regular topics of everyday business and promoting them through personal leadership and training.

We have implemented a binding Compliance Management System (CMS) for the entire LEDVANCE Group which is continuously adapted to suit the evolving needs of the business and its legal framework.

The system is based on three pillars: 1) prevention; 2) detection; and 3) response to compliance violations – and there are dedicated employees (Compliance Officers) tasked with upholding it in each region and country. Through our CMS, we aim to ensure that all employees comply with statutory law and internal guidelines. The system and its details are explained in the Compliance Guideline which is binding globally across the organization. The guideline lays down essential rules of conduct for LEDVANCE employees, and supplements and specifies the basic principles set out in the LEDVANCE Code of Conduct. The guideline is a cornerstone in our efforts to prevent compliance violations. It outlines how to fight corruption, fraud and theft and how to avoid antitrust law violations and money laundering. Moreover, it explains how to deal with business partners, how to avoid conflicts of interest and how to provide benefits in a lawful way. It also explains the ‘detection’ and ‘response’ elements, among others how the reporting and handling of compliance cases take place.
Code of Conduct LEDVANCE Integrity Line

ledvance integrity line

We offer a protected (also anonymous) channel known as LEDVANCE integrity line "LILi" which is available to all employees and externals for reporting compliance validations.
 
LEDVANCE Integrity Line” (LILi)
LEDVANCE CODE OF CONDUCT

In 2022, 84 compliance training sessions were performed for and by LEDVANCE employees. At the heart of these training sessions is our web-based compliance basic training, which must be performed by each new employee within the first three months after joining the company. This training is intended to provide participants with an initial overview of global anti-corruption and antitrust law and to raise awareness of the specific responsibilities of each LEDVANCE employee. A dedicated web-based compliance training course is available especially for procurement employees. The training course, which is an integral part of the so-called Global Procurement (GP) Academy, aims to provide participants with an overview of the specific responsibilities of procurement employees in addition to the basic compliance training for every employee.

In-person compliance refresher training sessions are conducted for all employees three years after their basic training. The in-person training provides participants with a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the LEDVANCE Compliance Management System, including compliance rules, processes and organization. It is intended to enable participants to apply what they have learned in their daily work.
LEDVANCE maintains hundreds of external partnerships at any given time. It is therefore important to identify and address compliance risks in this context. These risks are monitored through a software-based Business Partner Compliance Tool. In 2022, 499 active business partners were registered with the tool and 133 Compliance Due Diligences (CDDs) have been conducted for new business partners
A new governance and reporting tool, Ethical, which was implemented at the beginning of 2022, lays down a digital foundation for the global management of compliance and ethical risks. Ethical is an online tool that assigns and tracks the completion of tasks, and collects information through structured questionnaires on a global level and down to each business unit. Each task and each question in a questionnaire can be tagged with a ‘stream’ and/or a ‘topic’, which allows us to track the completion of tasks or questions and information about the ethics and compliance function at a detailed level. Using Ethical, we can follow completion rates in real-time, help local colleagues fulfil tasks, spot anomalies early on, visualize our program KPIs, export reports and use our data to achieve ISO (International Organization for Standardization) certification and improve our resilience. For improved efficiency, sustainability reporting is also managed via questionnaires in Ethical. Online Training via Microsoft Teams has been conducted for all relevant employees, thereby enabling them to gain the respective knowledge and to work with the tool in a proficient manner.