GeSI View: From Audit to Alliance – Why the Future of Global Supply Chains Will Be Built on Collaboration

By Luis Neves, Chief Executive Officer, GeSI

Audits help companies understand where their supply chains stand. Building resilience requires a sustained investment in the people, partnerships and capabilities that help them improve.

For two decades, companies have invested heavily in auditing their supply chains. These efforts have helped establish standards, improve transparency and bring greater attention to environmental and social risks. Yet suppliers can face repeated assessments without receiving the support they need to address the problems those assessments reveal. 

We need to close that gap. 

As companies navigate geopolitical disruption, diverging sustainability requirements and growing demands for reliable data, the limitations of an approach centred on inspection are becoming clearer. Due diligence remains essential. Its value increases when evidence leads to practical support, shared learning and lasting improvements. 

At GeSI, this understanding underpins our new Sustainable Supply Chain Strategy: a shift towards partnership, supplier capability building and shared digital infrastructure.

Turning expectations into capability 

For many suppliers, sustainability requirements arrive through multiple customer relationships. Each customer may bring a different questionnaire, reporting platform or audit request, often seeking similar information in a different format. 

The burden can be particularly difficult for smaller businesses with limited resources. Time spent responding to overlapping requests is time unavailable for improving operations, developing skills or implementing decarbonisation measures. 

Buyers have a role to play in changing this experience. Clearer expectations, common assessment frameworks, shared training and supplier mentoring can help turn compliance requirements into achievable improvements.

The question we should be asking is how to give suppliers the capabilities to meet those expectations consistently—and to grow stronger in the process. 

Collaboration in a fragmented world 

Companies operating across regions must navigate different approaches to trade, technology, sustainability and data governance. Their suppliers often serve customers across several of these markets at once. 

Collaboration cannot remove those differences. It can help companies respond to them more effectively. 

Common methodologies and interoperable data can reduce unnecessary duplication. Trusted relationships can make it easier to identify emerging risks, discuss capacity constraints and coordinate responses before problems escalate. 

This requires commitment from buyers as well as suppliers. A collaborative model depends on a willingness to share knowledge, align expectations and invest in improvements whose benefits extend across the value chain.

GeSI’s next chapter 

Over the past 25 years, GeSI has brought the ICT industry together to advance sustainability, including through collaborative approaches to responsible sourcing and supplier transparency. 

Our new Sustainable Supply Chain Strategy, developed with epi Consulting, builds on that experience. It establishes a dedicated Sustainable Supply Chain Pillar within GeSI, with a practical objective: to help companies strengthen resilience, compliance and sustainability through shared industry action. 

The strategy recognises that participants enter this work with different needs and levels of maturity. 

For brand and Tier 1 companies, it aims to improve visibility into supplier capabilities, support more efficient compliance and advance commercial and emissions reduction objectives. 

For Tier 2 and smaller suppliers, it provides a pathway towards stronger capabilities through clearer guidance, training, mentoring and innovation support. 

Across the wider ecosystem, it supports common standards, interoperable data and shared infrastructure that companies can develop and use together. 

Delivery is organised around six connected elements: industry governance; a shared scorecard and assessment framework; training and development; supplier mentoring; data verification and syndication; and recognition programmes that highlight innovation and good practice. 

Together, these elements support a progression from awareness and understanding to implementation and recognition of performance. The emphasis is on helping suppliers make measurable progress from their own starting point. 

Making the business case practical

Collaboration has value when it improves how supply chains operate. 

Closer relationships can provide earlier visibility into risks and help businesses coordinate contingency plans. Shared forecasting and planning can improve decisions about capacity, inventory and logistics. Common assessment approaches can reduce duplication for both buyers and suppliers. 

The same relationships matter for sustainability. Addressing value-chain emissions requires companies to work with suppliers on data quality, energy use and practical emissions reduction measures. Progress on repair, refurbishment and product life extension also depends on coordination across organisations. 

Digital technologies can support this work. AI-assisted supplier analytics, interoperable sustainability data, digital product passports and trusted digital identities offer opportunities to improve information exchange and decision-making. 

Their usefulness depends on the foundations beneath them: reliable data, clear governance and the ability of suppliers to participate. Building these foundations together is central to GeSI’s approach.

An invitation to build together 

The success of this strategy will depend on what companies and suppliers can achieve through it: fewer duplicated requests, stronger capabilities, better information and measurable improvements in performance. 

GeSI is bringing together brand and Tier 1 companies, suppliers across every tier, technology partners and sustainability leaders to help put this approach into practice. 

We invite organisations to contribute their experience, identify shared challenges and help shape solutions that work across the industry. Our ambition is to make collaboration a practical part of how supply chains are managed every day. 

The next chapter of responsible sourcing will be judged by the improvements we enable together. 

To learn more about GeSI’s Sustainable Supply Chain Strategy or discuss opportunities to participate, contact info@gesi.org.