Supply chain visibility has long been framed as a moral imperative. Procurement needs to know who their suppliers are and who stands behind them. They need to know what conditions exist at the bottom of their supply chain.
All of this is still true and worth caring about, but as Justin Dillon, founder and CEO of FRDM AI, explained in a recent episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, that moral case alone has never been enough to drive the kind of change that is needed. The business case, on the other hand, is getting harder to ignore.
Justin came to supply chain risk management from an unlikely place. He started as a musician, became an activist and documentary filmmaker focused on modern slavery and forced labor, worked with the State Department on raising awareness around the issue, and eventually concluded that the most durable way to address human rights abuses in global supply chains was to fix the visibility problem. FRDM AI, the company he built, helps organizations map their supply chains and access the intelligence needed to act on the risks they find.
The Business Case for Change
For years, the argument for supply chain visibility leaned heavily on ethics and corporate responsibility. Justin says there are real limits to that approach: "A moral case is not enough … I don't need altruism to change the world. I actually think the best way to make change in the world is a business case."
The acceleration of tariff pressures and expansion of supply chain regulatory requirements have strengthened that business case considerably. Companies that once treated supply chain visibility as a nice-to-have are increasingly recognizing it as a core risk management priority. Building visibility into your supply chain reduces risk and exposes challenges that could be hurting workers and potentially the planet. As Justin puts it, this is one of those rare situations where everyone wins.
But visibility alone is not the finish line, as he explains it. "Companies are starting to realize that just bolting a solution onto their supply chain also means that there's going to be a few changes that may need to be made in the supply chain as well.” Checking boxes and filing questionnaires is not due diligence. It is, as Justin describes it, the procurement equivalent of using a 90s style pager in 2026. The tools exist now to do something far more meaningful.
The Questionnaire Problem
About 80 percent of companies can’t see beyond tier one of their supply chain. For the 20 percent that can, the reasons vary: regulatory requirements in sectors like defense, pharma, and finance compel it, or they are simply the kind of organizations that want to dig deeper. For the majority, the dominant approach to supply chain due diligence remains the supplier questionnaire, and Justin does not mince words about its limitations.
"You can't map a supply chain with questionnaires," he said. Asking suppliers to identify and report on their own sub-suppliers creates enormous administrative burden and data that is at best incomplete. Suppliers have learned over two decades of being pelted with questionnaires to give buyers what they need to go away. The defense mechanism is well established, and procurement has unintentionally built it themselves.
Justin argues that procurement has to focus on getting outside the questionnaire model entirely and moving toward risk analytics that can surface intelligence without requiring suppliers to do procurement's work for them.
Repairing the Supplier Relationship
Rebuilding trust with suppliers is critical if the goal is to achieve better visibility over time. If procurement has spent years showing up with demands, they have to start showing up with something to offer instead.
Companies have the option to share supply chain data with suppliers and surface intelligence they would not otherwise have access to. Many suppliers do not know they are being assessed, that calculations are being made about whether to continue working with them, without anyone ever speaking to them directly. Sharing that information changes the nature of the relationship.
"When you frame it around resilience and not risk, it sounds like you are partnering, not judging," Justin said. That reframing, he explains, shifts the conversation from audit and compliance to shared interest in a stronger, more resilient supply chain.
The Lever Procurement Holds
As Justin rightly points out, sourcing professionals, more than almost anyone else in business, hold an enormous economic lever. Every decision about which supplier to work with is also a decision about every company standing behind that supplier, all the way down through every tier. The more intelligence available to inform those decisions, the better the outcomes, for the business, for suppliers, and for the people who ultimately sit at the bottom of global supply chains.
Realistically, there is also no perfect choice, as Justin acknowledges. That said, some choices are better than others, and making them starts with being willing to actually see what is there.
For more on this topic, listen to Justin's full episode of The Sourcing Hero here:
