For many companies, the number of suppliers involved in the overall supply chain can be in the thousands, and in some cases, tens of thousands.

Even when the number of suppliers is more manageable, the number of products, or Stock Keeping Units the company operates can be complex.

A mistake that many companies have made is trying to solve this all-in-one go. It makes the task unnecessarily complex and bewildering.

A better approach is to break the supply chain down into logical chunks and then into focus areas.

Defining the logical chunks is going to be something that the company is going to need to define themselves and will depend on a lot about the type and configuration of the supply chain.

A clothing retailer, for example, could decide to tackle women’s casual outerwear first. It may be a part of the business they understand well and may have a small number of products to evaluate.

The focus areas are more uniform across companies and the common areas are:

• How goods are transported between each stage of the supply chain
• The equipment that is used during the value add process at each stage
• Any infrastructure, such as warehouses etc, that support the value add process.

The most logical focus area to start with is transportation. This will help unlock who the suppliers are, where the factories are physically located and how goods are moved up and downstream at each point.

If you try and define equipment and infrastructure before transportation you may find that you are evaluating a supplier that may not be a member of the supply chain in the future so it’s a waste of effort. You may also wish to assign ownership of this activity to each layer of the supply chain in turn.

For example, the ultimate buyer may only directly deal with the tier one / finishing factory suppliers and could then instruct them to define the suppliers they interact with. Once complete it gets passed down the chain until you reach the ultimate end point of the supply chain.

If suppliers can see benefit in taking ownership the complexity of the task managed by the ultimate buyer becomes significantly smaller.

We designed Zero Pro to add value to the suppliers. We allow suppliers to access visualisations on what they do today, benchmark their activities against a consolidated view of other suppliers and gain access to reporting tools that allow them to simplify their own scope 3 regulatory reporting requirements.

By breaking the supply chain down in this way, we should have expectations that measurable deliverables can be achieved every 30 days.

This is a vast improvement on where most companies are today - and at a much reduced total cost.