Only 12 percent of procurement teams hold solid data on the majority of their Tier 2 suppliers, according to a Sedex survey released alongside an expansion of the company's supply chain mapping and risk assessment tools. The figure compares with 82 percent of respondents who reported having firm data on their direct suppliers.

Sedex, whose customers include Marks & Spencer, Li & Fung and John Lewis Partnership, announced the changes as procurement teams push for more visibility farther upstream in their sourcing networks. More than 90 percent of survey respondents expected that checking deeper tiers would reveal risks they had yet to identify.

What changes in the mapping tool?

The 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 labour or environmental standards — a distinction compliance teams will need to keep in mind when using the data for due diligence files.

Once connections are live, corporate teams can filter suppliers and worksites by tier in Sedex's analytics dashboards. The company said the tools help users identify higher-risk locations and gaps in suppliers' remediation efforts.

"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."

How far does the risk data reach?

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 audit methodology, SMETA 7.0.

Sedex said 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 consolidates supplier worksite information into a single view, letting users set priorities for environmental management and further assessment.

Where are the exposure points?

Sedex's own worksite data points to the scale of the gap upstream: 15 percent of sites had no measures in place to ensure their own suppliers or subcontractors met required labour standards.

For buyers, the constraint is structural. Disclosure in the mapping tool still depends on supplier participation — customers can see an upstream connection only after the supplier approves it. Tier 2 visibility therefore advances at the pace upstream vendors accept the connection, not at the pace compliance deadlines require.

"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.

The decision the news forces on sourcing and compliance leads is straightforward: audit which upstream relationships your direct vendors have actually approved in Sedex, and treat unapproved connections as unassessed exposure rather than absence of risk.