Historic Futures has launched String3, a new online supply chain risk monitoring tool, which enables brands and retailers to ask questions about where and how their products are made.

Managing supply chain risk, and carrying out due diligence, without knowing the organizations involved in global supply chains is a huge challenge. String3 makes it possible for organizations to ask questions of their supply chains, supporting both reputational and regulatory risk management activities.

“String 3 is an online supply chain risk monitoring tool that enables organizations to find out about their product supply networks, assess the responsiveness of the suppliers involved, and obtain more and better data about how and where their products were made,” said Tim Wilson, founder and CEO of Historic Futures. “After many years of research and user testing we are now able to offer brands and retailers a simple way to ask questions of their supply chains and get the answers they need to support them in managing their risk more effectively.”

String3 has been developed over the past two years by Historic Futures, experts on gathering supply chain data. The tool has been successfully piloted by well-known brands and retailers, including a number of apparel retailers and companies in the mining, minerals and forestry sectors. They have asked questions to find out the country of origin for cotton, country of timber harvest for viscose, country of mining for tantalum and tungsten, and species of animal and country of origin for leather.

Companies ask a simple question such as, “Where did the timber come from in this product?” The question gets passed along the supply network until it reaches the organization that can meaningfully answer. The company asking the question receives a report in String3 showing them the countries of origin but not the details of the organizations within the supply chain.

Crucially, everyone in the supply chain remains anonymous and suppliers are connected together without their identity being revealed. This is important as brands and retailers can receive the information they need from their supply chain, without having to know the details of every organization within it, and suppliers can be confident that the details of who they source from will never be disclosed to anyone else within the network. Moreover, suppliers benefit from using a tool that is free and simple for them to use and only asks them about the part of the question that they know about.

String3 can be used to identify potential risks within product supply networks. The risks might arise from complexity of the network, physical location of suppliers in the network, or lack of information about those suppliers.

Historic Futures has achieved ISO27001 certification for its Information Security Management System.