High-Quality Supply Chain Data Is Essential for Credible Sustainability Reporting

6 top barriers and how you can overcome them

Article key points:

• High-quality primary supply chain data is essential for credible sustainability strategies, risk reduction, and business resilience—and it doesn’t need to be difficult to collect it at scale.
• Estimates, averages, and assumptions don’t paint a true picture of your own products’ impacts which makes real progress hard to achieve, and prove. 
• Worldly helps brands and suppliers overcome real barriers, from manual data collection and inconsistent formats to assessment fatigue and misaligned incentives.
• A lack of clarity around what data matters most often leads to wasted effort and low-quality reporting.
• When data doesn’t drive decisions or improvement, supplier trust and engagement quickly erode.
• Companies that standardize, align expectations, and use data for action—not just reporting—are eliminating barriers and building momentum.

Primary supply chain data: a true picture of your impact

Primary supply chain data is the foundation of credible sustainability, risk and reputational management, and business resilience strategies. It’s what enables brands, retailers, and manufacturers to understand where their biggest impacts actually occur, prioritize the right actions, and demonstrate progress with confidence—to regulators, investors, and consumers alike.

Despite growing pressure to improve transparency and accountability, many companies still struggle to collect consistent, high-quality primary data from their suppliers. So instead, they rely on industry averages, spend-based estimates, or assumptions that only offer a fuzzy view of impact—even though better options already exist.

Collecting primary data doesn’t need to be a barrier for you and your brand. Learn six of the most common barriers brands face and how they overcome them with Worldly to collect primary data efficiently at scale. 

1. The hidden complexity behind “just collecting the data”

From the outside, asking suppliers for environmental or social data can sound straightforward. In practice, it often requires significant time, coordination, and disruption—especially for facilities already operating under tight margins and intense production schedules.

Many suppliers still manage critical data manually, across spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, or local systems that weren’t designed for standardized reporting. Pulling that information together can mean diverting staff from day-to-day operations just to meet reporting requirements. When data collection feels like an added burden rather than a value-creating activity, it’s no surprise that quality and completeness suffer.

How Worldly helps: 

The Worldly platform provides a user-friendly way for facilities in your supply chain to collect and share the quantitative and qualitative data brands need to ensure supply chain transparency. One of the biggest advantages for facilities using Worldly is the ability to share their assessments with any brand customers they want. When brands adopt Worldly as their standardized sustainability reporting solution, they enable their supplier partners to be more efficient and reduce redundancy and assessment fatigue. 

2. Inconsistent formats turn data collection into more work

Even when suppliers are willing and able to provide primary data, inconsistency can undermine its usefulness. Data submitted in different formats, through different channels, and with varying definitions creates friction on both sides.

For brands, this means spending time normalizing, cleaning, and reconciling information before it can be analyzed or used for decision-making. For suppliers, it often means re-entering the same information multiple times to satisfy different brand or retail customers that each have their own templates, tools, and expectations. The result is frustration, inefficiency, and a higher risk of errors—all common symptoms of fragmented data collection approaches.

How Worldly helps: 

Worldly standardizes how supply chain data is collected, structured, and shared—eliminating the need for brands and suppliers to juggle multiple formats, templates, and reporting channels. By using industry-aligned assessments within a single platform, suppliers can enter data once and share it easily and consistently with all participating brand customers. For brands, this means receiving comparable, decision-ready data without time-consuming normalization or reconciliation. The result is higher data quality, fewer errors, and faster movement from data collection to insight and action.

3. Not knowing what data truly matters

Another common barrier is uncertainty around what data should be collected in the first place. And this happens from both the brand and retailer side as well as the supplier side. Without a standardized assessment framework, brands, retailers, and suppliers may not know which data points will create meaningful impact, and which ones will simply disappear into a report.

This lack of clarity can stall progress before it even begins. When expectations aren’t aligned, suppliers may hesitate to invest time and resources into data collection, especially if they’re unsure how the information will be evaluated or used.

How Worldly helps: 

Worldly provides standardized, industry-aligned assessment frameworks that clearly define what data matters and why. By grounding data collection in widely accepted methodologies, Worldly removes guesswork for both brands and suppliers—creating shared expectations around which data points drive impact, insight, and improvement. This alignment gives suppliers confidence that the data they collect will be used meaningfully, while helping brands focus efforts on the information that supports better decisions, risk reduction, and measurable progress.

Want to know what primary data moves the needle most? Download Worldly’s analysis that shows how much measurement, and which specific data points, make the biggest difference.  

4. Reducing assessment fatigue at scale

As expectations rise for brands to be more responsible, so does the number of assessments suppliers are asked to complete. Requirements often vary from brand customer to customer, even when they aim to measure similar outcomes. Over time, this leads to assessment fatigue.

Suppliers may be asked to measure the same activities repeatedly, using slightly different methodologies, or they may be asked to collect the same data and input it into a number of disparate systems. All of this, perhaps without any clear feedback on how the data drives improvement. When assessments feel duplicative or disconnected from real outcomes, engagement naturally declines—and data quality goes with it.

How Worldly helps: 

Worldly reduces assessment fatigue by enabling suppliers to complete standardized assessments once and share them across multiple brand customers. Instead of responding to duplicative requests through disconnected systems, suppliers can use a single, trusted platform to meet a wide range of reporting needs. For brands, this approach improves participation and data quality; for suppliers, it saves time and effort while ensuring their work contributes to real improvement discussions rather than repetitive reporting.

5. When effort isn’t matched with incentives

Collecting primary data takes time, expertise, and money. For suppliers, the effort can be substantial, especially when assessments are required annually or even more frequently. Yet in many cases, there are few tangible incentives tied to that effort.

Without signals like long-term partnerships, preferred supplier status, or clearer commercial alignment, data collection can feel like a one-way transaction. Your suppliers and their facilities are asked to invest resources, but don’t always see how that investment benefits their business.

How Worldly helps:

Worldly helps turn data collection from a one-way request into a foundation for stronger, more transparent supplier relationships. By making supplier data visible, comparable, and actionable across brand customers, Worldly enables companies to recognize performance, prioritize engagement, and align sustainability efforts with commercial decisions. When suppliers see their data used to inform long-term partnerships, improvement plans, and business opportunities, data collection becomes an investment in their future—not just a reporting obligation.

6. The biggest frustration: data that goes nowhere

Perhaps the most demotivating barrier of all is when collected data doesn’t lead to action. Suppliers regularly report frustration when the information they’ve worked hard to provide isn’t used in purchasing decisions, improvement planning, or collaborative initiatives.

When data disappears into dashboards no one discusses, or reports no one shares back, it sends a clear message: The effort wasn’t worth it. Over time, this erodes trust and makes future data collection even harder.

How Worldly helps:

Worldly is designed to ensure supply chain data leads to action—not dead ends. By transforming assessment data into decision-ready insights, benchmarking, and visibility across suppliers and facilities, Worldly helps brands use data to guide purchasing decisions, target improvement efforts, and collaborate more effectively with suppliers. When suppliers see their data actively discussed, shared back, and used to drive real outcomes, trust grows—and participation becomes a catalyst for continuous improvement rather than a sunk cost.

Turning barriers into momentum

These challenges are real, but they aren’t insurmountable. The companies making the most progress today are the ones shifting how they approach data collection: moving from fragmented, manual processes to standardized, collaborative systems that create value for everyone involved.

That means aligning around common frameworks, reducing duplication, clarifying expectations, and—most importantly—using the data that’s collected to drive decisions and improvement, not just check boxes on reporting requirements.

When suppliers see that their data leads to better conversations, smarter investments, and stronger partnerships, participation improves. Data quality improves. And supply chain sustainability (and the risk reduction that comes with it) moves from aspiration to action.

From data collection to impact with Worldly

Worldly helps brands, retailers, and suppliers move past these barriers by making primary data collection easier, more consistent, more efficient, and—most importantly—more valuable for everyone involved.

Through standardized assessments, supplier engagement tools, and decision-ready insights, Worldly connects data to real outcomes. This helps companies reduce reporting fatigue, improve data quality, and turn information into action across their supply chains.

For more insights on how leading brands and retailers are succeeding with their environmental and social assessment efforts using best practices from Worldly, download our guide Maximize Supplier Engagement: 5 Proven Ways to Improve Primary Data Collection at Scale.