The Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) is a multi-stakeholder initiative working across a number of complex and multi-tiered global supply chains, including electronics and automotive, to advance responsible business conduct. To aid in this effort, they operate a platform called RBA-Online, a secure, online sustainability data management system designed to help RBA members and their suppliers manage and share sustainability data, including from independent, third-party audits and self-assessment questionnaires that assess risk at the corporate, facility and supplier levels.

One of their challenges in managing this dataset and expanding it into further supply chain mapping technology, is the fragmented and varied nature of production location data points. Wanting to promote greater interoperability and harmonization for their members, within and beyond their own activities, the RBA engaged Open Supply Hub to solve this challenge and map their supply chain dataset to a common identifier, the OS ID, using OS Hub’s human-in-the-loop machine learning deduplication algorithm and best-in-class supply chain data moderation practice. The end goal being that all suppliers and parent companies in the RBA ecosystem are assigned common identifiers and classified in accordance with internationally-recognized classification systems for industry sectors, enabling RBA members to more easily connect their RBA data to other systems and tools to advance traceability, collaboration and data sharing.