Every new regulation arrives with good intentions. Whether it's product safety, packaging obligations, human rights due diligence or sustainability reporting, the objective is ultimately the same: Create greater transparency and accountability across global supply chains.

Few people in industry argue with this goal. What they argue with, quietly and expensively, is how we’ve chosen to pursue it. 

As new requirements emerge, organizations often respond by building new portals, questionnaires and reporting workflows. The result is a hidden layer of duplication that consumes time, resources and attention without improving compliance outcomes.

Too often, companies spend more effort managing compliance processes than acting on the insights those processes are meant to deliver.

Start at the top. A retailer needs compliance data from its brand partners: due diligence documentation, certifications and sustainability records. That’s a reasonable request, but when seven retailers each build their own questionnaire, portal and submission process, a brand selling through all seven is completing the same exercise seven times over.

The pattern repeats throughout the supply chain. Brands request information from suppliers, who upload the same audits, certifications and disclosures into multiple systems. The information changes very little, but the process changes constantly.

Moving down one layer, brands face the same dynamic with their suppliers. A manufacturer supplying 10 brands might upload the same factory audit, certification and environmental disclosure to 10 separate systems, because every brand has built its own process.

The supplier at the end of this chain, often a mid-sized manufacturer in a developing market with limited administrative capacity, absorbs the cumulative burden of all of it.

The cost shows up as higher operational expenses, slower reporting cycles, delayed onboarding and valuable resources diverted away from actual risk management and improvement efforts.

This significant structural problem compounds across every compliance domain simultaneously. The information that compliance requires — supplier records, audit findings, sourcing data — already exists in most organizations. 

Retailers are beginning to rethink how compliance processes are structured. Instead of continuing to build infrastructure in parallel, companies are moving toward more consistent ways to collect, manage and share compliance information across the supply chain.

The solution is simple: If everyone is asking for the same information, stop asking for it separately. When companies align on common definitions, data requirements and reporting processes, brands can reduce repetitive requests while maintaining access to the information needed to support compliance efforts.

The approach works by treating compliance as shared infrastructure rather than a proprietary process. The distinction creates opportunities for greater consistency and makes the same logic applicable further down the chain. When brands align on how they request information from suppliers, the burden on manufacturers drops without any reduction in what's actually being asked of them.

When the administrative cost of compliance derives primarily from duplication and fragmentation rather than the substance of the requirements, it creates a participation barrier that has nothing to do with actual performance or risk. That undermines the purpose of the regulation itself. Shared infrastructure, by contrast, removes the coordination tax that falls heaviest on those least able to pay it.

Compliance requirements will keep expanding. The question is whether the industry builds shared foundations fast enough to absorb new obligations without compounding the existing fragmentation.

The retailers moving toward pre-competitive, collaborative compliance processes are betting on the value of shared approaches. And the brands, other retailers and suppliers that participate in this effort can clearly see the dividend.

Hrishikesh Rajan is chief growth officer and co-founder of TrusTrace.