New Facility Risk Reports Target Blind Spots in Supplier Screening

For supplier-screening and procurement teams, the problem is not a missing policy. It is a missing view of the plant that actually ships the parts. McKinsey partner Knut Alicke, co-author of the firm’s Global Supply Chain Leader Survey, has said a large share of disruption starts in the sourcing network. That survey found nine in ten supply chain leaders hit challenges in 2024, while only 60 percent reported comprehensive visibility even of their tier-one suppliers. Visibility further down the chain fell for a second straight year. That is the gap Ecolumix is trying to close with IN-Site facility risk reports covering more than one million U.S. industrial and commercial sites.

Scott Lehmann, VP Product Management at Sphera, Operational Risk Management & Supply Chain, told The Supply Chainer that shocks do not create new risks so much as expose ones that were never mapped. “The Strait of Hormuz didn’t create new supply chain risks. It made invisible ones visible,” Lehmann said. “Leading enterprises are no longer starting their risk analysis from a supplier list. They’re starting from their products, decomposing each product line through components and materials down to Tier 2 and Tier 3.”

The Ecolumix reports pull air, water, hazardous waste, and worker safety compliance history into one facility profile, with multiyear trends and performance scores. They are built for supplier screening, due diligence, and monitoring of sites already in a network. The September 16 launch argues that voluntary supplier disclosures and internal reports do not replace the public regulatory record.

Which indicators matter most

Doug Parker, Founder and CEO of Ecolumix, said screening teams concentrate on persistent non-compliance at a single site. “We've seen that a history of persistent non-compliance at a facility - say, dozens of Clean Water Act violations year after year, or major worker safety penalties are the clearest signs of facility-level risk, and those indicators are what supply chain leaders are focused on. We’ve also seen risk compound when violations span multiple regulatory programs at once. That kind of systemic noncompliance across different areas of an operation is something that users are heavily focused on as they screen new suppliers and monitor existing ones.”

How companies use the reports

The same scores are used to separate outliers from strong performers and to track deterioration before a site fails. “Companies are using Ecolumix IN-Site facility risk reports to spot patterns of deteriorating performance over time. Because each facility is measured against the full universe of U.S. sites for EHS risk, outliers are easy to identify, and strong performers stand out just as clearly. Extensive violations across a facility can also signal broader operational risk. In one case, a near-sole-source supplier had a long history of poor EHS performance across water, waste, and safety compliance before a massive fire idled the site for over a year. Spotting that pattern earlier could have helped every company relying on that supplier to avoid this risk.”

A single site can idle a market. Aon reported that a single-site disruption accounted for about 60 percent of U.S. intravenous-fluid shortages, and that life-sciences firms ranked supply-chain or distribution failure as their top risk in 2025.

A second source on the same problem

The same facility-level gap sits behind Ecolumix’s March 2026 partnership with ERM. ERM is using the data to measure EHS performance across enterprises, aim audits at the highest-risk sites, and assess supplier and vendor EHS risk that can hit operations, legal exposure, and brand. Ramesh Narasimhan, Global Managing Partner, Safe & Sustainable Operations at ERM, said demand for EHS benchmarking has risen as public data transparency has raised the stakes. The partnership, he said, is meant to show companies how they compare with peers, how performance varies across their own operations, and where to apply corrective work. Parker’s comment on that partnership matches the IN-Site use case: risk has to be read in context, across operations and against peers, at the facility where EHS performance is produced.

What the reports contain

Each IN-Site report includes Clean Air Act permitting and emissions history, Clean Water Act discharge rates and pollutants, RCRA hazardous waste generation, TRI toxic release data, OSHA filings and inspections, and NRC reportable releases, plus additional EHS KPIs. Reports can be run for one site or as a portfolio screen of dozens or hundreds of facilities.