Why supplier surveys fail, and what to do instead

The survey went out months ago. Some suppliers answered, many did not, and the answers that did arrive do not line up with each other. The reporting deadline has not moved. If that is your Scope 3 programme, the problem is not your team. It is the method.

Why do supplier surveys fail?

Supplier surveys fail because they ask busy companies to do unpaid work on your schedule. The suppliers most likely to answer are the large ones who already publish the data elsewhere, which means the survey mostly collects what already exists, slowly. The long tail stays silent, and the gaps get filled with proxy data and sector averages that no one fully trusts.

The answers that do come back create their own work. One supplier reports in tonnes of CO2e, another sends an energy figure, a third attaches last year's PDF. Someone has to normalise all of it in a spreadsheet, chase the ambiguous entries, and explain the joins to an auditor later.

What does the survey cycle cost a Scope 3 programme?

A season. Teams that run annual survey campaigns spend the first half of the cycle chasing responses and the second half reconciling them, which leaves little time for the work the data was collected for: finding hotspots, engaging the suppliers that matter, and tracking reduction. The baseline is stale by the time it is defensible, and the whole exercise restarts the following year.

What is the alternative to supplier surveys?

Start from the data that already exists. A large share of any supplier base discloses emissions somewhere: annual reports, sustainability reports, regulatory filings, customer programmes. Found disclosures, matched to the right legal entity and normalised to one standard, cover much of a supplier base before anyone is asked to fill anything in.

DitchCarbon provides verified emissions data for over 2 million organisations, so procurement, sustainability and finance teams can measure and act on supply chain and portfolio emissions from one source. Matching runs on entity resolution against DUNS, LEI and ISIN identifiers, every figure carries its source and change history, and coverage gaps are shown, not hidden. In a recent deployment that approach reached about 60% of a large supplier base within 2 weeks.

Where do surveys still make sense?

In the gaps, and only in the gaps. Once found disclosures have covered what they can, a targeted request to the suppliers that remain is a reasonable ask, and a prepopulated request built on data the supplier has already published gets a better response than a cold questionnaire. The ask shrinks from an afternoon of form filling to a confirmation.

What if you are the supplier being surveyed?

Then you know the other half of this story: the same data, requested by every customer in a different format. You can claim your organisation's profile free, publish your numbers once, and point every requester at the same answer.

See it on your own suppliers

The argument is easy to test. Request a walkthrough and see the coverage on your own supplier list before you send another survey.