How Sayari Map Accelerates Supplier Risk Prioritization

A New Supply Chain Risk Paradigm

Widely regarded as the most restrictive supply chain regulation in force today, the UFLPA raises the stakes for non-compliance in two key ways, setting a precedent for other regulations:

1. Importers are increasingly responsible for their entire supply chains. By establishing a prohibition on goods made wholly or in part with forced labor, the UFLPA requires any company looking to bring products into the United States to vet its supply chain down to the raw material. This means compliance teams must evaluate direct suppliers based not only on their own risk, but also on their upstream or sub-tier risk. This level of due diligence remains a challenge for most companies. In a 2022 survey by McKinsey, only 17% of supply chain leaders said they had visibility down to the third tier and beyond. This underscores the extent to which regulatory demands are outpacing compliance resources.
2. Enforcement can have an outsized impact on revenue. If U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) suspects a good of being UFLPA non-compliant, it will issue a Withhold Release Order (WRO) to detain the entire shipment — not just the good in question. In this way, a single non-compliant product can adversely impact other inventory, putting added pressure on compliance professionals to root out high-priority risk.

Newer regulations are already beginning to take cues from the UFLPA. The CSDDD, for example, requires covered entities to conduct due diligence not only on their own operations but also on those of their subsidiaries and other entities within their direct and indirect business relationships.

While its enforcement differs from that of the U.S. law, the proposed EU Forced Labor Regulation similarly bans products made with forced labor from EU markets. It follows that one non-compliant component could render an entire product inadmissible.

As deeper supply chain visibility becomes the status quo and penalties for violation grow more severe, compliance teams are faced with more work and higher stakes. Supplier prioritization workflows relying chiefly on manual labor are ill equipped to meet the demands of this new regulatory regime. Emerging technologies leveraging automation, by contrast, enable companies to gain deeper supply chain visibility more quickly and using fewer resources.

How It Works

Sayari Map automatically creates high-probability maps of supply chains, scans them for relevant risk, and presents the results in an accessible, actionable format. Organizations that use automated risk detection as part of their supply chain management workflows catch more critical vulnerabilities than those that do not — and in mere seconds.

Sayari Map Accelerates Risk Detection

Unlike supplier testimony, which references only internal data, Sayari Map uses corporate, trade, and risk data to paint a picture of individual supply chains from the outside in.

Sayari’s corporate database contains profiles on nearly 600 million companies and more than 660 million key individuals across 250+ jurisdictions worldwide. Its trade database is more geographically comprehensive than any other on the market, and its risk insights go far beyond watchlisted entities to include a vast array of non-obvious risk types.

By matching their supplier lists against Sayari’s comprehensive database, organizations can instantly generate highly relevant, highly filterable supply chain maps tracking 100+ risk indicators n-tiers deep. Each entity in the map links to an entity profile complete with court-admissible records substantiating the risk source (See Fig. 1).

Such targeted insights at these unprecedented speeds are made possible, in part, by a proprietary technology called product blueprints. A product blueprint is a generic bill of materials, built using a large language model, that lists the components likely used in the manufacturing of a specific product.

Say, for example, that you’re an apparel company that sources women’s sweatshirts from a manufacturer called Acme Clothing. Acme makes a wide variety of clothes, including men’s jeans and jackets. If you were to generate a supply chain map for Acme Clothing and filter by the HS code for women’s sweatshirts (6110), Sayari Map would pare down Acme Clothing’s sub-tier supply chain to include only those companies highly likely to be involved in the manufacture of that product. Companies supplying rivets, buttons, denim, and synthetic down to Acme, for example, would be filtered out thanks to product blueprints (see Fig. 2).

Advanced filtering tools would then allow you zero in on high-risk suppliers — or suppliers with risk further upstream in their supply chains — and prioritize those for more resource-intensive due diligence efforts.

In this way, U.S. importers are able to build maximally efficient compliance programs, protecting against complex regulatory risk in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Targeted Automatic Risk Detection with Product Blueprints

Sayari Map accelerates supplier risk prioritization by providing organizations with immediate access to three critical supply chain insights, all of which become increasingly targeted with the help of product blueprint-enabled filters:

1. Direct supplier risk.
   When a user uploads their list of direct suppliers, Sayari Map instantly matches those suppliers against its market-leading database of entities using analyst-designed entity resolution algorithms. Because the entities in Sayari’s database are pre-screened for 100+ types of risk, users can instantly view any risk flags associated with their direct suppliers.
2. Direct suppliers’ upstream risk.
   Suppliers without inherent risk may be sourcing from risky entities further upstream in their supply chains. Sayari automatically identifies these risks and maps them to the corresponding direct suppliers.
3. Suppliers with the greatest risk impact.
   Organizations can configure Sayari’s risk insights to reflect their unique risk appetites by deactivating irrelevant risk types, changing risk alerts’ priority levels, and creating custom risk categories. This ensures that companies are able to quickly detect which suppliers, whether direct or upstream, will have the greatest impact on their specific compliance mandates.

Taken together, these insights dramatically accelerate supply chain risk management timelines by enabling efficient risk prioritization, supporting supplier data collection, and even providing evidentiary support critical to the data validation process.

Case Study: Auto Manufacturer Isolates Critical Risks with Sayari Map

A leading automotive manufacturer leveraged Sayari Map in order to better assess its upstream supply chain risk and ensure compliance with the UFLPA. After uploading its direct supplier list, the manufacturer filtered the resulting supply chain repeatedly in a variety of combinations over a period of weeks from June to September 2024. The charts below convey how the manufacturer parsed its suppliers in order to optimize its risk mitigation response (See Fig. 3).

The manufacturer applied risk category filters more than 400 times over the course of the project time period; 343 of these were for forced labor filters. A closer look at the top forced labor filters applied by the manufacturers compliance team reflects a focus on non-obvious risk related to ownership and sub-tier trade.

Top Forced Labor Indicators	Total Number of Times Applied
Owner of Xinjiang-Based Entity	4
Possibly the Same As (PSA) Sheffield Hallam University Forced Labor Reports Entity	4
Supplier Network with Entity from Sheffield Hallam University Forced Labor Reports	2
Owner of Entity from Sheffield Hallam University Forced Labor Reports	2
Supplier Network with UFLPA Entity	2
Related to Entity from Sheffield Hallam University Forced Labor Reports	2
Supplier Network with ASPI Entity	2
Supplier Network with Xinjiang-Based Entity	2
Supplier Network with WRO Entity	2

Finally, the manufacturer applied other types of ancillary filters to rendered supply chain maps, specifically product and component filters, suggesting an attempt to isolate the most relevant sub-tier suppliers (See Fig. 4).

The ability to segment and filter supply chains, drilling down even into very specific types of forced labor risk, has enabled the automotive manufacturer to more efficiently and effectively target high-impact suppliers, inform their document collection efforts, and aid in supplier data validation, ultimately doing more to mitigate risk to the company.

Timely, Confident Risk Detection

By supplying corporations with instant access to highly targeted supplier risk data, Sayari Map enables compliance teams to optimize their supplier due diligence programs and keep pace with mounting regulatory pressures.

Sayari Map’s outside-in approach to supply chain intelligence helps companies more effectively prioritize their supplier risk and optimize lines of inquiry during the supplier assessment process. Not only that, but its records, backed by court-admissible documentation, assists in the supplier data validation process as well.

Sayari Map also enables users to monitor suppliers for changes in risk status. Trade data is updated monthly, so if a supplier’s purchases change from one month to the next, any resulting change in trade risk will be reflected in the platform. All users in the organization will additionally be notified of the change so that they can respond accordingly and in concert.

Through automation, Sayari Map greatly accelerates the supply chain risk management process, enabling importers to quickly identify suppliers of concern and focus their investigative resources on those. Third-party audits, questionnaires, and site visits are necessary for validating suspected risk and managing the relationship, but Sayari Map ensures that teams managing hundreds or thousands of supplier relationships are able to deploy those more labor-intensive tools as confidently and efficiently as possible.

The burden of proof is increasingly on U.S. importers to demonstrate that their products are in compliance with trade regulations down to the raw material. Automated risk detection platforms like Sayari Map can better protect multinational corporations from regulatory risk and enforcement actions by facilitating more efficient and effective use of human resources, particularly in an age of increasingly complex global supply chains.

Use Sayari Map to save resources and effectively protect against supply chain risk.