Corperate Governance - transparency on all levels

The basis of successful and sustainable business operations is trustworthy and transparent corporate actions. Long-lasting competitiveness, employment, and economic success can only be ensured in this way. The binding orientation framework for proper actions is set by the OECD guiding principles for the prevention of corruption in business transactions, the national and international legal requirements, and the agreements made with Schnellecke. Our business partners transparently regulate the handling of possible conflicts of interest and the prevention of corruption and economic crime. They adhere to competition laws and do not make any agreements or contracts that impact prices, conditions or competition.

Our values, guidelines and expectations on our daily conduct are bindingly formulated in the KWD and Schnellecke Code of Conduct. Board members, regional directors, managing directors, corporate division directors, managers and employees of Schnellecke worldwide are bound to our values mission statement and these principles. Together we are pursuing the goal of loyally and ethically putting our business operations into practice along these requirements. For this, managers take on a special role-model function.

Compliance is an indispensable part of the values culture in the KWD Group. We live compliance out of the conviction that we are only successful when we orient our corporate actions on the compliance with the law and legislation, as well as internal and external boundary conditions.

Systematic preventive work is expected to prevent violations of legal requirements, corporate guidelines, and contractual customer requirements. This is achieved through a globally oriented training program, the setting of internal compliance standards, and the systematic monitoring of the established compliance measures.

The KWD Group Compliance Management System is based on our Code of Conduct, our KWD Spirit corporate values, and a regular corporate-wide compliance risk analysis throughout all departments which specifies the scope, emphases and intensity of the yearly compliance activities.

A suitable officer has been appointed within the company for the monitoring of compliance. He has extensive investigative authority at his command and is to be consulted in cases of doubt. The Chief Compliance Officer is supported in the further development of the Schnellecke Group Compliance Management System by a Compliance Committee.

As an internationally active corporate group, we know that we also affect diverse stakeholders. At the same time, our stakeholders in turn decisively determine our corporate success through their actions. Therefore, the KWD Group maintains a continuous dialog with its stakeholders in all regions and at all sites. This dialog takes place both site-specifically with local stakeholders, as well as across sites and topics with various stakeholders.

For decades now, the KWD Group has lived a togetherness characterized by the KWD corporate values and an open, honest and sincere dialog. These corporate values are collected in the KWD Spirit and are actively communicated to the employees at all company sites.

Team spirit, the courage to change, a sense of responsibility – these are the main elements of the Schnellecke Spirit. Based on this, we want to take with us each and every employee as an internal stakeholder on the way to more sustainability. Open and honest communication is meant to promote independent action and proactive initiative, and to contribute to developing a more comprehensive understanding of ecological, economic and social interrelations.

The KWD Group regularly negotiates collective bargaining agreements with the responsible union. These agreements are made freely and fairly. The same is true for the negotiations about bargaining agreements with the works councils. Furthermore, we are collective bargaining agreement-bound members in employers’ associations in several regions and are involved in the further development of regional collective agreement regulations. We are firmly committed to the regional collective agreement so that the same competitive conditions prevail, and, in line with our social responsibility, we are strictly opposed to a competition that is exclusively led on personnel costs. Together with employers’ associations and unions, we also advocate this position in public, for example at public events or podium discussions.

We strive for the continuous improvement of quality, environmental and energy performance, occupational safety, health protection, and the economic efficiency of the company. To this end, we design our processes in the best possible way, verify our activities through regular product, process, and system audits, and optimize them accordingly.

We support the acquisition of facilities, products, services and work equipment that meet our requirements in the areas of quality, environment, energy, and occupational safety or optimize their performance.

We take appropriate precautions to ensure that the contractual partners working on our company premises apply at least the same environmental and safety standards as we do.

This policy is obligatory for all employees. It is the framework for our quality, environmental, energy, and occupational safety objectives and is reviewed annually for appropriateness and validity. The currently valid norms/standards are the basis for the integrated management system