The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issued “Adapting Trade Policy for Supply Chain Resilience: Responding to Today’s Global Economic Challenges” in January 2025. The document, a compilation of six policy papers, covers a range of topics, including sustaining resilient textile and apparel supply chains and harnessing rules of origin for resilience.
COVID-19 clearly highlighted the fragility of supply chains. In its aftermath, the USTR is looking to move from trade and investment policies that prioritized “short-term cost-efficiency, profit maximization, and shareholder returns” to a “more holistic approach to promoting supply chain resilience using trade tools and policies.”
Paper 5 in the USTR release, “Improving Data and Analytical Tools to Promote Supply Chain Resilience,” summarizes the four dimensions of supply chain resilience and the challenges to achieving resilience using current data and analytic tools.
The four dimensions of supply chain resilience
A resilient supply chain offers many benefits, including the ability to adapt and rebound after shocks, uphold labor rights, protect the environment, and strengthen U.S. manufacturing and the workforce. The USTR paper outlines four dimensions of supply chain resilience informing U.S. trade and investment policy: sustainability, security, diversity, and transparency.
Sustainability
Sustainable supply chains help protect and promote labor rights and environmental protections. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) is an example of recent legislation to promote sustainability.
Security
Secure supply chains help mitigate vulnerability in select industries and product categories through techniques such as re-shoring, friend-shoring, and near-shoring.The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act of 2022 (CHIPS and Science Act) is an example of legislation designed to increase manufacturing and development in the U.S. and help the U.S. respond to the economic and national security issues resulting from a dependence on foreign manufacturers.
Diversity
A variety of suppliers mitigates over-concentration risks, helps ensure a robust industrial base, and promotes more inclusive supply chains. Executive Order (E.O. 14017) on America’s Supply Chains is an example of recent efforts to help build resilient, diverse, and secure supply chains supporting critical U.S. industries.
Transparency
Visibility into raw materials and intermediate products helps organizations identify potential shortages and other vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with regulations. The ability to investigate beyond first-tier suppliers is a critical component of comprehensive supply chain mapping and risk identification. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) and the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG) are examples of recent regulations calling for improved supply chain transparency to help eliminate forced labor.
>> Learn how to uncover three non-obvious indicators of forced labor risk <<
Improving data and tools to promote supply chain resilience
The complexity of modern supply chains introduces risk for U.S. businesses and also presents data gaps and analytical challenges for trade policymakers. The USTR paper identifies four data limitations and challenges for these policymakers.
Data granularity
The USTR paper notes that while supply chain data is an increasingly valuable asset, it is often “unstructured and dispersed,” making it difficult for even the supply chain participants to analyze. Further, there is limited insight into the trade and production networks that produce a single good: “the typical semiconductor production process can take up to 100 days, of which 12 days are for transit between supply chain steps, as products cross borders approximately 70 times before reaching their final destinations.”
Lagging data
The USTR paper notes that “supply chain resilience analyses that predominantly depend on conventional, retrospective economic data can become outdated quickly.” Lagging data hampers policymaker efforts to develop proactive risk assessment and incentives. Organizations, in turn, struggle to stay current with updates to trade regulations.
Insufficient data sharing
Inconsistent definitions and metrics, varied technologies for collecting data, and proprietary concerns hamper data sharing among supply chain participants and between the public and private sectors. As a result, policymakers struggle to determine if organizations’ efforts to build resilience through diversification are, in fact, working across sectors and the economy.
Domestic visibility
Global supply chains have domestic components. However, policymakers struggle to assess how imported goods are integrated into domestic production processes at a granular level. As a result, there’s limited insight into how disruptions to production in foreign countries may cause unexpected ripple effects in the domestic economy.
>> Learn how to meet new BIS recommendations to identify and mitigate diversion risk <<
How Sayari Helps
Technology solutions play a critical role in delivering supply chain resilience. The policymaker challenges that USTR identifies often affect organizations as well as they strive to be accountable for their supply chains. Sayari helps policymakers and the private sector gain deep and broad insight into supply chains for the common goals of supporting resiliency directives, driving economic security, and protecting national security.
The foundation of Sayari’s solution is data. Sayari is trusted by regulators and the regulated because we’ve made significant technology investments in automating the collection and processing of this data from primary sources. Sayari collects over 4 billion pages of primary source documents from nearly 500 databases in over 200 jurisdictions. This source documentation is messy, unstructured, and comprises dozens of foreign languages. Sayari extracts the people, companies, and connections in these documents and applies entity resolution and linking to structure the data in a massive network graph. Then, Sayari flags direct and indirect risk indicators such as actual or potential matches to watchlists, political exposure, links to government and state-owned enterprises, or trade with high-risk partners through multiple layers of transactions. As a result, organizations can easily visualize complex commercial networks, expose hidden risk, and perform due diligence.
Our U.S. corporate data covers all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Leveraging publicly-available/publicly-sourced data (e.g., outside-in supply chain mapping) is critical in ensuring supply chain resilience. Sayari’s supply chain maps allow organizations to see all the suppliers producing a single good – even as products cross borders. By matching your 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. Advanced entity and trade search on a wide list of attributes allows you to more precisely target your investigations, saving time and resources.
>> Get techniques for more effective supply chain forced labor risk identification <<
Sayari risk insights go far beyond watchlisted entities to include a vast array of non-obvious risk types. Sayari adds and refreshes data constantly to ensure these insights are fresh, empowering teams to act with confidence and accuracy. The most critical data is updated on a biweekly basis, and sanctions list data is updated every 24 hours. In addition, attributes and relationships have clear sourcing with a timestamp for the date it was collected and last refreshed.
Sayari also allows organizations to compile this comprehensive corporate and trade data to generate L1 Due Diligence reports that include risk summary, ownership preview, downstream holdings, import overview, source documentation, and date of last update. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of suppliers and potential risks to help organizations minimize operational disruptions and maintain regulatory compliance.
Request a personalized demo of Sayari to see how you can simplify supply chain mapping and risk identification to ensure greater resilience.
