Businesses are facing a time of unprecedented complexities and supply chain disruptions. Recent tariff developments demonstrate how quickly sourcing patterns can shift, highlighting the need for agility and adaptability from companies.
With businesses looking to new sourcing markets and completely reshuffling their operations, how can companies ensure they are effectively assessing the new risks that come with this change and establish alignment with new supply chain partners?
Assessing risks of new markets
Understanding the inherent risk exposure of new sourcing regions can be conducted using a robust dataset, advanced analytics and beyond audit tools to identify incidents that may go undetected in audits.
Using data insights from more than 30,000 onsite audits per year, EiQ generates risk scores for hundreds of sourcing geographies, empowering companies to make informed sourcing decisions and understand emerging risks. EiQ’s beyond-audit tool utilises machine learning and human intelligence to scan thousands of media channels for supplier incidents related to critical issues such as health and safety, wage issues, worker strikes and more. This level of foresight allows businesses to choose new sourcing partners with intention and proactively mitigate issues and disruptions.
Aligning new partners through a tailored approach
Supplier training is proven to be an effective strategy for aligning new partners to compliance objectives and facilitating site improvement. An underrated component of this is deploying training in suppliers’ local languages to ensure a targeted, tailored approach and supporting further collaboration.
EiQ houses the most comprehensive and highest quality library of supply chain sustainability training on the market. Recently, we launched more than 20 new interactive video courses in Spanish and Vietnamese to support our library expansion in various languages. This expansion is in addition to the courses available in nine other languages, such as Bengali, Chinese, German, French, Hindi, Japanese and more!
Let’s explore how we can use data and these new courses to manage risk during new supplier onboarding.
Building a risk-based training programme in Vietnam
Vietnam has become an increasingly attractive sourcing destination for businesses looking to mitigate trade war risks and optimise their supply chains. Data shows Chinese products have been rerouted through Vietnam to avoid tariffs, indicating its evolving role in sourcing as the trade war ensues. With the Geography Risk Landscape feature in EiQ , businesses can access onsite audit data, civil society data, and AI-powered incident alerts to identify regional supply chain risks in Vietnam.
For example, audit data shows key risk drivers in Vietnam in 2025 are risk for domestic migrant workers, issues around working hours, and wage-related risks.
EiQ incident alerts also show many health and safety issues in Vietnam, some rated as 'extreme'. Audit data identifies the top two health and safety risks in Vietnam as fire safety and worker injuries.
Using this information, we can curate the following eLearning curriculum in EiQ, designed specifically for new Vietnamese suppliers:
- Working with Migrant Workers
- Working Hours
- Working Hours Management Systems
- Working Hours Recording Systems
- Managing Wages and Benefits
- Fire Safety
- First Aid
- Emergency Preparedness
Total training time: 3 hours
Onboarding suppliers successfully in Mexico
Mexico has also emerged as an attractive new sourcing region as trade policies shift. Mexico also shows increasing vulnerabilities in EiQ in 2025, such as extreme risk levels for forced labour issues and inhumane treatment.
Mexico-based suppliers being onboarded could therefore be asked to complete the following courses on EiQ’s training module:
- Forced Labor Prevention for Factories
- Working with Students and Young Workers
- Introduction to Human Rights Due Diligence
- Transparency & Business Integrity
Total training time: 2 hours
Learn more about how to implement these case studies in real-time to support your navigation of the complex landscape and help you to achieve total supply chain confidence.
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- Take a look at our 2025 EiQ training showreel.