Transparency-One: Vendor Analysis, 2021 update — Supply chain visibility and responsible sourcing solution overview, strengths/weaknesses, competitors, tech selection tips

Prior to the Covid pandemic, supply chain visibility might have been considered either a growing interest or merely a “nice to have” level of data. In today’s world, however, that mindset has completely flipped. Organizations that have not already begun exploring the deeper tiers of their supply chain and assessing their resilience soon will be, not only to proactively manage risk but also to counter increasing scrutiny from governments, investors and consumers about where raw materials come from, the labor that went into producing products and the environmental effects a product’s journey from source to store entails.

Pre-empting this trend toward greater visibility and responsible sourcing capability was Transparency-One, a solution that enables procurement groups driving responsible sourcing efforts to report accurate supplier and compliance data to sales, marketing and regulatory compliance functions about what’s happening in their supply chains end to end, as well as to map product tracking and quality information down to the lot/batch level. Transparency-One provides a supply chain network approach to enabling supply chain visibility, complemented by deep expertise in supplier requirement gathering and, in new capability developed since our initial review, in 2019, a set of responsible sourcing dashboards that consolidate internal data and with external feeds to enable geographic analysis of supply vulnerability to sustainability concerns, including human rights risks, water stress and deforestation.

This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis offers an update on our 2019 look at Transparency-One and its capabilities. It includes an overview of Transparency-One’s solution, a breakdown of what is comparatively good (and continuing to improve) about the solution, a competitive segmentation and analysis, and a tech selection checklist for those that might consider the provider.