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On your Radar: Sedex launches new risk assessment tool

Earlier this year, we launched Radar, a comprehensive new risk assessment tool to help businesses understand labour rights and environmental risks in their businesses and supply chains.

Understanding risk across a supply chain can feel difficult and overwhelming, especially when it can span multiple countries, sectors and tiers. But it’s a crucial part of building a more ethical, more resilient supply chain.

Radar simplifies risk assessment by combining inherent country and sector risks with supplier-specific information to highlight potential issues. With Radar, you can:

  • Map and mitigate risk
  • Compare levels of risk across countries, sectors and sites
  • Design action plans
  • Support suppliers’ efforts to improve their management systems

A business can assess themselves or their supply chains, analysing and comparing not only supplier risk, but also the management performance at a site.

Creating a complete picture

Through interactive global visualisation and site-specific data, Radar shows the known risks at suppliers’ sites and additional issues that are likely to exist because of their prevalence in a sector, country or region.

Radar applies scores out of 10 for sites, sectors and countries across different ethical issues, with 10 meaning an issue is highly likely to be present.

This helps a business to understand what the most likely issues in their supply chains will be even at the early stages of risk assessment. This allows companies to prioritise audits, risk management and improvement efforts depending on the most common or most severe issues.

Tom Sewell, Radar’s Product Manager at Sedex, said: ‘’We’re delighted to  launch our new risk assessment tools, designed to help companies understand where to focus their attention and resources to have the greatest impact for workers and the environment.

By placing vulnerable workers at the centre of risk assessment, Radar helps companies pay special attention to how risks might impact these individuals, and to implement effective due diligence and improvement plans with their particular needs in mind. This in turn will help our members to build resilient supply chains, which the recent COVID-19 pandemic has exposed as a fundamental need for sustainable businesses.’

Spotlight on Radar’s core assessment tools

Radar’s core risk assessment tools offer dashboards and reports that enable businesses to drill down into their supply chain data and understand site-specific risk:

  • Risk Assessment Matrix – a tool combining country and sector risks with data from suppliers connected to a business on the Sedex Advance platform. It helps to identify suppliers operating in high risk environments or with workers more vulnerable to labour exploitation.
  • Site Assessment – Overview – This report shows the risks associated with a single site and helps businesses track and measure local improvements.
  • Site Assessment – SAQ (Self-Assessment Questionnaire) – This report contains all the information from a site’s SAQ. The data in an SAQ contributes to a site’s overall risk score, and will help to show why a site falls into a certain risk category.

Learn more about Radar