Knowing a supplier doesn’t necessarily mean knowing who supplies it.
Sedex is expanding its supply chain mapping and risk assessment tools to help businesses identify individual worksites beyond their direct vendors. The updates come alongside a company survey finding that just 12 percent of respondents have data from the majority of their Tier 2 suppliers.
The supply chain technology provider, whose customers include Marks & Spencer, Li & Fung and John Lewis Partnership, announced the changes as procurement teams seek more information about the businesses farther upstream in their sourcing networks.
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Sedex already offered mapping beyond direct suppliers. The latest update changes how suppliers add their own upstream connections, allowing them to label those relationships by tier. Before a connection becomes visible to downstream customers, the upstream supplier must approve it.
That approval confirms the business relationship being mapped. It does not, by itself, establish that a facility meets labor or environmental standards.
Once those connections are available, corporate teams can filter suppliers and worksites by tier in Sedex’s analytics dashboards. The company said the tools can help users identify higher-risk locations and gaps in suppliers’ efforts to address problems.
“Leaders are being asked to make increasingly important sourcing decisions in an environment that is less predictable than ever,” Sedex CEO Jon Hancock said. “That requires more than broad network models and head-office information—it requires data that distinguishes between every individual facility.”
The gap shows up in Sedex’s survey: 82 percent of respondents reported having solid data on their direct suppliers, but just 12 percent said the same about Tier 2. More than 90 percent expected that checking farther upstream would reveal risks they had yet to identify.
“By going beyond direct suppliers and combining site-level data with richer risk insight, corporate teams can prioritize resources to target the most significant gaps, risks or impacts across their supply chains,” Hancock said.
Separately, Sedex said its worksite data showed that 15 percent of sites had no measures in place to ensure their own suppliers or subcontractors met required labor standards.
The mapping changes include an expanded Sedex risk assessment tool that covers 15 topics across more than 120,000 registered worksites.
Its Audit Risk component draws on patterns of noncompliance from more than 250,000 SMETA audits covering 115,000 sites in 106 countries. The dataset includes findings from the latest version of the audit methodology, SMETA 7.0.
According to Sedex, incorporating audit findings helps flag issues that broader contextual data alone might miss. The scores are intended to help customers decide which suppliers warrant closer attention.
“The hardest part of supply chain sustainability risk management is knowing where to act first,” said Duncan Ellis, Sedex’s chief product and technology officer.
Wage risk calculations now incorporate information from more than 70,000 site-level SMETA audits alongside external sources. Sedex said the combined data helps identify where wages are more likely to be excessively low or fall short of legal requirements.
The company has also added environmental risk reporting that brings supplier worksite information into a single view, allowing users to set priorities for environmental management and further assessment.
For the mapping tool, disclosure still depends on supplier participation: customers can see an upstream connection only after the supplier approves it.
