A tier-one automotive supplier in Pune had passed audits for years while the same findings kept resurfacing. Working on the ground with World of Gears, the team moved from documentation to worker-informed improvement — and closed its most persistent gaps in a single 90-day sprint.
Anchor Precision Components supplies precision-machined parts to global automotive brands from its plant in Pune. With around 600 employees and a demanding delivery schedule, the company had built a solid reputation for quality — and, over several years, had passed a series of customer and third-party social-compliance audits.
But as buyers deepened their human-rights due-diligence expectations, passing audits was no longer enough. Customers wanted evidence that issues were being resolved at the root, not simply documented and re-documented at each audit cycle.
Each audit surfaced a familiar set of findings — working-hours records that didn't reconcile, inconsistent grievance handling, and gaps between written policy and shop-floor practice. Corrective action plans were closed on paper, yet the same issues returned at the next visit.
The root problem wasn't unwillingness. It was that fixes were designed for the audit, not for the people doing the work. Nobody had sat with line supervisors and workers to understand why the gaps kept reopening.
Anchor's sustainability lead had worked with remote consultants before and wanted something different: a partner who would actually be in the plant, in the local language, alongside the team. World of Gears was brought in precisely because the work is done on the ground in India — not through a portal or a checklist sent from abroad.
"We didn't need another report telling us what was wrong. We needed someone on the floor helping us fix it — in a way our supervisors could actually sustain."Head of Sustainability, Anchor Precision Components
The engagement began with an on-ground supplier risk assessment: dialogue-led, rightsholder-informed, and designed to surface what audits routinely miss.
Rather than issuing a new corrective action plan, the World of Gears team spent time where the work happens — talking with workers and supervisors, tracing each recurring finding back to its cause, and building fixes the shop floor could own.
The six recurring findings that had reopened at every audit were closed during the sprint — and stayed closed at the next customer visit, verified independently.
Because supervisors helped design the fixes, the new routines became part of how the floor runs rather than a checklist for the next audit.
Anchor could now show buyers not just a clean audit, but evidence of how issues are found and resolved — the shift from "Do you have a policy?" to "Show us how it works."
The difference is that our people fixed it, and they know how to keep it fixed. World of Gears didn't do it for us — they made sure we could do it ourselves.
Tell us where the same findings keep coming back. We'll show you what a practical, on-ground fix could look like for your operations in India.
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