The Standards That Govern How We Do Business
Compliance with applicable laws, specifications, standards, and internal guidelines serves as the basis for how we do business. Our Festo Code of Conduct is a binding standard that governs the business activities of all Festo employees and reflects our understanding of the law and our values.
Festo expects its business partners to also uphold this standard. In addition to our Festo Code of Conduct, the minimum standards for business partners defined in the Code of Conduct for Business Partners set out the principles of conduct that we consider appropriate and essential for all types of business activity.
Our Compliance Office supports the global implementation of our Codes of Conduct and is the point of contact for any questions our customers and employees may have within this context.
Compliance at Festo
Compliance is intended to protect against inappropriate and illegal behavior (prevention), and to systematically clarify, evaluate, and sanction such behavior (response). Festo has a zero-tolerance policy and sanctions all violations.
This protection encompasses our most valuable assets and our business activities, including our interactions with each other. This includes the traditional compliance areas of corruption, damage to assets, cartels/collusion, and organizational culture. Other areas relevant to compliance include tax law, export/customs, quality and the environment, privacy, and labor law. The relevant departments bear the responsibility for these other areas, including the respective risk management activities (e.g. the Corporate Tax department is responsible for compliance with tax law).
Therefore, Festo has implemented a Compliance Management System (CMS) that includes all necessary principles, processes and measures to ensure compliance with the requirements and laws in the above-mentioned classic compliance areas. The Festo CMS was audited by external auditors in accordance with the German standard IDW PS 980 and has been confirmed as appropriate and effective.
Your Feedback Is Important to Us
We want to live up to our own standards and continuously improve as a learning company. If you would like to give us information about misconduct or any violation of our Code of Conduct, please contact our Compliance Office or – in cases of human rights and environmental violations – Corporate Responsibility. Alternatively, you can get in touch with us securely and anonymously via our whistleblower portal.
Reporting Compliance Violations
Why Report a Compliance Violation?
Festo wants to always be an attractive employer and reliable business partner. As part of being a learning company, we want to continuously improve our processes and our business activities. Reporting compliance violations helps us do just that.
Which Reports Are Helpful?
We investigate all reported violations of applicable law, internal policies, and our codes of conduct, and initiate corrective measures and improvements.
How Does Reporting a Compliance Violation Work?
If you think that our business conduct contradicts our codes of conduct or does not comply with applicable law, please get in touch with us using the contact details provided above. We appreciate your openness.
If you prefer, you can also submit a tip anonymously, however – such as by using an anonymous email address or anonymously and securely via our whistleblower portal. In this way, if we need to clarify any of the details, we can contact you directly with our questions via the anonymous email address or the whistleblower portal.
Secure and Anonymous Whistleblower Portal:
Our whistleblower system gives employees and external third parties worldwide the ability to report possible misconduct by individual employees of the Festo Group in various languages.
Conflict Minerals
In the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries, raw materials are mined that may be used to finance violent conflicts, hence the term “conflict minerals.” With this in mind, we make every effort not to purchase any materials sourced from the Congo region.
Festo is required to disclose the sources of its materials within the supply chain. We fulfill this obligation insofar as we are able by providing an up-to-date CMRT (Conflict Minerals Reporting Template). If you have any questions in this regard, please contact your local technical support team .