As global supply chains have grown more layered and complex over the past few decades, the number of variables businesses need to account for in their manufacturing networks has expanded in stride. Organisations seeking to preserve supply chain continuity must now focus on everything from direct and sub-tier suppliers to geopolitical disruptions to a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. As these factors have proliferated, the opportunities for disruptions have increased, leaving businesses with more potential supply chain vulnerabilities than arguably ever before.
In response to this swelling roster of risk exposures, companies have developed new strategies for keeping a closer eye on their goods, suppliers, and manufacturing sites. These efforts are generally categorised under the umbrella term supply chain visibility, which refers to an organisation’s ability to see all these variables – including, often, manufacturers operating multiple tiers deep within their supply chains.
A related term, supply chain transparency, has emerged in recent years to convey not only visibility but also the practice of sharing the data gleaned from that visibility with internal and external stakeholders. Alexis Bateman, who served as the Director of MIT’s Sustainable Supply Chain Lab before transitioning to a role at Amazon Web Services, defines supply chain transparency by breaking it down into two critical elements. Supply chain transparency requires visibility, which she defines as “accurately identifying and collecting data from all links in your supply chain”; and disclosure, which refers to the practice of “communicating that information, both internally and externally, at the level of detail required or desired.”
But there’s a third approach organisations are now taking to master their supply chains – one that can serve as an even more powerful tool for cultivating supply chain resilience: traceability.
Following the breadcrumbs
Supply chain traceability can be defined as the ability to track materials, goods, and other commodities throughout their supply chain trajectory, beginning with raw materials and ending with the final product – whether that be an automobile, advanced semiconductor, or toaster oven. In practice, this often means identifying the various manufacturing inputs that transform raw materials into components, sub-assemblies, and finished products.
Because of how supply chain traceability emphasises the journey of the goods themselves – rather than suppliers or manufacturing sites – practicing it effectively requires businesses to track various forms of documentation, including chains of custody, warehousing records, and shipping manifests. This level of detail and granularity make supply chain traceability a more detailed, intensive process than visibility, which is typically used in reference to suppliers and sites. But while supply chain visibility might be understood as a valuable but largely fixed map, traceability uses data, records, and other forms of evidence to tell a dynamic, real-time story about how a product was created.
A skeleton key for compliance
With the emergence of ESG regulations like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), in-scope businesses will soon have to understand the inner workings of their supply chains with a new level of specificity and nuance.
To take the EUDR as an example, covered organisations in industries such as rubber, wood, coffee, and palm oil will need to provide location data for where their goods were originally sourced, while also demonstrating that the extraction and manufacturing processes did not contribute to deforestation. Effective supply chain traceability will be essential to complying with the EUDR – which is now slated to be implemented for large EU businesses in December 2026. That’s because traceability allows businesses to track both the origins of their products and the production journey they embarked on afterward.
This same agile visibility makes traceability valuable to a range of other regulations, including not only ESG directives but also environmental laws and trade sanctions.
Navigating the tariff labyrinth
If there was one word that defined supply chains in 2025, I’m hardly going out on a limb in declaring that it was probably ‘tariffs’. As the Trump administration implemented import levies on countries, sectors, and specific goods, businesses jostled to respond. US importers laboured to understand all the links in their manufacturing networks, in what often amounted to a haphazard effort to identify what levers they might pull to reduce their tariff burden.
As the US’s tariff regime persists into 2026, organisations will continue trying to adjust their supply chains to cut import costs and work toward a more financially sustainable model. Supply chain traceability will be a critical asset in these efforts, allowing sourcing and procurement professionals to see the full trajectory of their imports – and what tweaks could result in meaningful cost reductions. For example, finding ways to alter the country of origin (COO), or making small modifications to manufacturing processes, could yield lower tariff rates.
Seeing the full chess board, so to speak, and all the pathways and maneuvers within it, is only achievable with robust supply chain traceability.
Trace critical minerals to their mine of origin
The past year or two have revealed to businesses just how dependent many of them are on China for critical minerals and rare earth elements (REEs) – and how willing the Chinese government is to exploit this leverage for geopolitical ends. Due to these revelations, companies are now working to de-risk their mineral supply chains away from China, to safer, more stable sources.
But restructuring critical mineral supply chains is a complex affair, and companies need to be able to reverse-engineer their products all the way back to the raw materials that were mined and processed in China or elsewhere. Again, here, traceability is essential: businesses need to know exactly what critical minerals are being sourced from China, and where they fit into their larger supply chains, before they can carry out the work of identifying new sourcing opportunities for these materials.
True supply chain resilience requires robust traceability
When professionals in sourcing and procurement talk about supply chain resilience, it’s often in the context of effectively handling disruptions in the near-term – natural disasters, geopolitical events, factory shutdowns. But supply chain resilience is also about being able to deftly navigate the variables just peeking over the horizon, risks that may be one or multiple years away from fully materialising.
Supply chain traceability is an essential capability for achieving this kind of resilience.
Companies that have robust traceability are more agile and dynamic, because they understand their value chains with a depth and specificity that enables them to make decisive, targeted adjustments on the fly. Whatever new risk variable emerges on the horizon in 2026, 2027, or beyond, traceability will continue to be the lens that gives supply chains cohesion and coherence – bringing all the innumerable puzzle pieces to light.
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This article originally appeared in the March/April issue of Procurement Pro
