Integrity and Transparency for Trustworthy Supply Chain
licenses, vulnerabilities, and pedigree of the items described in the BOMs. While many are now exploring or implementing the capturing of information in these formats, much of that type of data still resides in paper or unique database systems and not shared. Even when captured in these standards, many organizations keep BOM information, as overviewed in Figure 3-1, close hold because of the proprietary insights into their products and production that BOMs can give.
Figure
3-1: Simple high-level overview of BOM content types.
With the wave of sustainability and forced labor use tracking and reporting requirements being enacted around the globe there is a new and powerful incentive for companies to collect and share information about the materials, energy, power, recycling, waste and other aspects of their final products. These assertions about products typically take the form of claims either directly by the producer or asserted by a certified third party for increased confidence in the accuracy and integrity of such claims.
This may also include some level of traceable provenance detail of the supply chains for these products to aid in exposing and reducing green washing, though the sensitivity of this data leads to local producer control of how much detail is shared and typically restrictions on who it is shared with. For example, in the European Union companies who sell products will soon need to provide the consumer / buyer with access to these types of data at the point of purchase [ 1 ].
To address this new sustainability and forced labor use reporting, companies are having to collect, analyze and communicate details of a product from all members of their global supply chain as it is created, and some portion of this data is then provided to external parties like consumers. With the global nature of supply chains this requirement crosses international and industry boundaries to manufacturers and raw material providers that contribute to products flowing to the EU. To enable this new reporting, new protocols like the UN Transparency Protocol( UNTP) from the United Nations [ 5 ] and W3C [ 6 ] are being created to provide and share this information
Journal of Innovation 63