Sedex has widened its supply chain mapping platform so brands and retailers can identify individual worksites beyond their direct vendors — an update built for a gap the company's own survey quantifies. Just 12 percent of respondents hold data on 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 push for more information on the businesses farther upstream in their sourcing networks.

How the mapping works

Sedex already offered mapping beyond direct suppliers. The latest update changes how suppliers add their own upstream connections, letting them 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 — a distinction compliance teams will need to weigh when they filter suppliers and worksites by tier in Sedex's analytics dashboards to pinpoint higher-risk locations and gaps in supplier remediation.

The survey numbers frame the demand. 82 percent of respondents reported solid data on their direct suppliers. Only 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.

"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."

"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.

For sourcing and compliance teams, the practical use case is triage: ranking sites by tier and risk before committing audit and remediation budget.

Audit data folded into risk scores

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 expanded risk assessment tool 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, including findings from the latest version of the methodology, SMETA 7.0. Sedex said incorporating audit findings flags issues that broader contextual data alone might miss, and helps 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 identifies 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.

The participation caveat

The mapping expansion carries a structural limit. Disclosure still depends on supplier participation: customers see an upstream connection only after the supplier approves it. The depth of any brand's tiered visibility will therefore rest on how many of its vendors choose to map and confirm their upstream networks — and how quickly they do it.