2024 has been a transformative year for Open Supply Hub (OS Hub), focused on scale and living into our mission of mapping cross-sector, global supply chains. As we celebrated and moved past our 5th birthday, we saw tremendous growth in the breadth of sectors mapped on OS Hub, with Agriculture, Food & Beverage now making up the highest percentage of the platform, overtaking apparel. Our team now includes over 20 people, working across four continents. On the technology front, we made critical strides behind the scenes on our platform architecture, which will help us build better search and API experiences in the near future. But what’s the milestone we’re celebrating the most? Our global supply chain database grew from 225,115 production locations in January 2024 to over 1 million today—a staggering 340% increase.
Open Supply Chain Data – 2024 in Numbers
For a year focused on scale, here are some of the numbers that best illustrate that growth:
While these numbers are a reflection of growth, they also set up a new level of real-world impact that this amount of open data can now enable for global supply chains.
Beyond Numbers – 2024 in Stories
There is a lot of work, collaboration, and impact that lives behind the headline numbers. Here are some of the ways the OS Hub dataset is showing up in the world:
Making it Easier to Exchange Supply Chain Data – No Matter Who You Are
This year, Open Supply Hub partnered with Mapped in Bangladesh and WikiRate to launch the Supply Chain Data Exchange (SC-DEX) Standard, a first-of-its-kind initiative creating a universal framework for global supply chain data. SC-DEX aims to address one of the most significant challenges in supply chains today: the lack of interoperability between datasets and systems used by different organizations.
The initiative gained traction throughout the year, culminating in September when SC-DEX entered its public review and comment phase. The community’s response has been overwhelmingly positive, with stakeholders across sectors providing insightful feedback to shape the standard’s future and direction. This public review is still ongoing: join to help refine the standard by checking the technical standard, the governance model, and the open letter of commitment.
As the regulatory landscape evolves and demands for compliance and transparency rise, SC-DEX is positioned as a critical tool to meet these expectations. By adopting the standard, businesses can improve compliance, promote cooperation, cut down on inefficiencies, and help create a safer and more equitable global supply chain ecosystem.
Building a Practice for Responsible Crisis Response
In a growing effort to provide timely open data resources around crises touching supply chains, and in response to the flooding and unrest in Bangladesh a few months ago, Open Supply Hub released resources and pre-drawn searches, that enabled stakeholders to quickly search for and identify production locations affected by the events and gain insight into their connections to other organizations, to collaborate on responsible and efficient response efforts.
By keeping supply chain data open and accessible, OS Hub hopes to continue to support a more informed and organized response to crisis moments, helping mitigate the impact on affected communities and supply chains, and promote accountability and collective action among stakeholders.
Mapping Across Industries: Agriculture Becoming Open Supply Hub’s Largest Dataset
Open Supply Hub has always aimed to cover open data across all sectors involved in global supply chains. Thanks to targeted efforts to broaden our reach cross-sector, and supported by a grant from The Walt Disney Company’s Supply Chain Investment Program, Agriculture, Food & Beverage has now surpassed Apparel—our original sector—and become the largest dataset on the platform.
In just over 12 months, our agricultural data has increased from 7% to 33% of all mapped production locations on OS Hub—a growth of over 344%. With raw materials such as cotton, soy, palm oil, and coffee, the ability to map and share data openly within this sector has far-reaching implications for addressing complex systemic issues like deforestation, labor exploitation, as well as climate change.
From mapping water risks in India to preserving Brazilian biomes, the continuous rise of open data across sectors is shaping a future where supply chains are not only mapped but also understood and improved through collective action.
Partnerships to Scale Transparency, Data Sharing, and Impact
Collaboration is key to advancing and accelerating impact, and OS Hub has focused on partnering with right actors to drive supply chain transparency collectively.
This year’s efforts led to deepened collaborations with four multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), which resulted in more than 400 companies lined up to share their supply chain data on OS Hub. Thanks to these four MSIs – Cascale, Ethical Trading Initiative, Ethical Supply Chain Program, and Ethical Tea Partnership – tens of thousands of suppliers across various sectors will be shared on our open data platform.
Additionally, several organizations have integrated the OS Hub platform into their supply chain data systems in the effort to increase their interoperability, harmonization and efficiency. Take a look at this year’s examples:
- The Responsible Business Alliance mapping their supply chain dataset to a common identifier, the OS ID, to advance traceability, collaboration and data sharing
- Global Rights Compliance integrating the OS Hub dataset to streamline information sharing between workers in factories and global brands
- Social Labor Convergence Program using OS IDs as a common language to increase the credibility of their verified data and boost user confidence
- amfori integrating with Open Supply Hub’s API to strengthen its Environmental Due Diligence tool
Uniting Open Data – Collecting Publicly Available Datasets under One Roof
At OS Hub, we have seen open supply chain data can bring greater accountability, equitable engagement and collective action. There might be publicly available supply chain data “out there” but they are often fragmented, difficult to access, and hard to compare or classify.
This is why our team dedicated several weeks this year to collecting publicly available data of two significant global supply chains—renewable energy and coffee. These two 6-week “sprints” built an essential data foundation for these industries, helping drive the transition to safe and sustainable supply chains.
This approach aligns with OS Hub’s underlying strategy: to ensure supply chain transparency is both inclusive and actionable. By proactively collecting and standardizing data, we can build a global ecosystem of equitable, open supply chains even faster.
Custom Supply Chain Maps with a Purpose: Sharing OS Hub Stories
2024 marked five years of Open Supply Hub, and we used this milestone to double down on the priorities that would shape the next phase of our journey. This led to the launch of the OS Hub blog, where we now share insights, perspectives, and stories from our team, who are working day in and day out with supply chain data and stakeholders.
Some of the most-used pieces were written by our in-country community team members based in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, and Türkiye, who are taking OS Hub data and creating practical applications to their local contexts and communities. You can now explore Brazilian biomes and the supply chains within them, discover how Open Supply Hub can help map water risks in Bengaluru production locations and empower garment workers’ unions in India, learn about workers’ rights issues and wage challenges in Bangladesh’s garments industry, or read an example of how open data was harnessed to aid in crisis response in Türkiye.
Building a Better Platform – 2024 in Product
2024 was also a year of significant progress when it comes to our technology. With an accelerated and more transparent release frequency—moving from quarterly releases to bi-weekly sprints—we could deliver more impactful features at scale – many of which were based on feedback by users like you. What have we done with more releases and robust processes? A lot!
Search, Profile, and Claiming Updates
One of the key differentiators for OS Hub as a supply chain database is that it is open and crowdsourced. An important piece of information on OS Hub profiles is the set of contributors that have submitted data for that production location. To make it easier to find production locations with lots of contributors, we introduced additional sort orders earlier this year. It’s a small but powerful change that allows users to easily sort the dataset based on most to least number of contributors to see the profiles with the most heat (i.e. “most connections”) on OS Hub, and who the stakeholders are who are connected to them.
Another update reflected on OS Hub’s search interface is that it’s now easier to view and search for groups of related sectors. For example, earlier this year, the dropdown filter for sectors listed each individual value in alphabetical order. This meant that “Apparel” and “Textiles”, while closely related in terms of production, were far apart in the search list. Now, high level groups of related sectors can be easily navigated in the dropdown filter, opting to keep all related sectors in their search or tweak the search by removing or adding individual sector values based on their needs.
Streamlining the profile claim process was another priority for 2024. We worked to consolidate the claim submission form, requesting fewer data points from users and enabling them to attach documentation directly in the workflow. The process is not only clearer for users, but also significantly improves our team’s process by reducing the instances of needing additional information from a claimant.
Improving the List Upload Process
Most contributors to OS Hub share their data via a list (an API option is also available for those with lots of data or who want a constant connection to OS Hub’s ever-growing dataset). Our efforts this year included spending time improving our parsing system so that messy data does not result in more work for data contributors or our team. Specifically, we made it so that data in all columns can be parsed based on commas, instead of by the (dreaded) vertical bar (“|”), which, when missing from lists previously, was the main reason for a list to be sent back for review. In addition, we included work to automatically correct messy punctuation and flag potential data issues to data moderators. Lastly, we increased the number of production locations that can be uploaded in a single list from the low thousands to 10,000.
Developing New APIs
OS Hub’s premium products include a REST API that has been a topic of great focus for our team in 2024. The API is critical for building an open, connected ecosystem, as it allows big, dynamic databases to integrate and exchange data. This work is a collaboration between our product and engineering team as well as API users who, together, have contributed to the infrastructure development for OpenSearch and an endpoint that allows users to check which data has been moderated. We are continuing to work towards the release of a new endpoint, /Production-Locations/, which is built on top of OpenSearch, and introduces additional search parameters, like search by claim status, certifications, local language name and fuzzy search.
In addition to API infrastructure work, this year we also integrated with Stripe’s payment platform to streamline payments for the API and Embedded Map products and updated our subscription model to offer both annual and monthly access to the API. These may seem small if you don’t work in Finance or Operations, but it makes a world of difference for these hard-working teams.
Supporting & Improving Team Processes
Much of what has been mentioned so far involves external-facing work, or is in support of eventual external features; however, we’ve also focused on giving our internal teams tools to better support our growing user base. For example, along with the re-work of the claims workflow, we revised the claim review screen so that data moderators can easily see the attachments that a claimant submitted and introduced the ability to message claimants directly from the claim review screen. Another improvement for the data moderation team is the ability to make a moderation directly from the list review screen. This means that as incoming data is reviewed, moderators can merge existing entries in the database if they see multiple profiles suggested as potential matches that actually represent a single location. Lastly, as we work towards releasing the POST endpoint for /Production-Locations/ as well as a frontend workflow for contributing one location at a time, we’re creating an expanded Moderation Queue that will streamline how data moderators view and make decisions about incoming data.
Digital Public Infrastructure Serving the Sustainable Development Goals
Last but not least, in September this year, we were humbled to have OS Hub recognized on the global stage when we were awarded the Runner-Up (second place) prize at the SDG Digital Game Changers Awards during the Climate Week NYC.
This prize linked our work directly with Sustainable Development Goals number 8 (decent work), 12 (responsible production & consumption), and 13 (climate action) through the digital public infrastructure we’re building for users to share, download, and use data to drive accountability and improvements for the millions of individuals and communities affected by supply chains.
Chosen out of 1000+ submissions, this recognition showed that opening up data about supply chains is a critical foundation for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals—something we’ve been championing since Day 1.
Source: ITU
That’a a Wrap!
The growth of our database, our team, and our features is all in pursuit of building the world’s most complete and open database of production locations to support the transition to safe and sustainable supply chains. The work that we’ve prioritized so far is enabling our team and products to further scale in support of this mission. While 2024 was truly a transformative year, we think the best is yet to come. From strengthening partnerships to expanding our data infrastructure to winning more awards, we look forward to continuing to collaborate with the OS Hub community to build tools that help us all realize a world with supply chains that are safe and sustainable for everyone. See you in 2025!
OS Hub is a non-profit platform that relies on philanthropic support to sustain the world’s most complete, open and accessible supply chain map. Join us in powering the transition to safe and sustainable supply chains by making a donation today.
